Non-sense CRM4 Customization Import Error

Here is another CRM4 customization import error that I recently ran into, but it's a non-sense and probably a nasty one.

What the problem is, I have been trying to update my development VPC image from rollup 9 to a more recent one. As soon as my VPC image is updated to any rollup after 10, I start to receive an error message when I try to import CRM customizations. The weird thing is, this error even happens in the same environment. By the same environment, I mean that it happens even I was exporting the CRM customizations and then re-importing the same customization file on the same server box.

Here is what the error message looks like:
Failure: incident_activity_parties: Cascade link type 'NoCascade' is invalid for Delete.

Since I had a little bit cycle today and I was aware that Microsoft has just released Rollup 14 last week, I thought it would be a good chance to give it another try. I usually had pretty good confidence at Microsoft team's fast turnaround in terms of bug fixing. Unfortunately it's not the case this time, the same error persisted after I updated to Rollup 14.

I was naive enough, I thought that I could become a hero if I could find a solution for this issue. So I turned on CRM server trace log, and re-ran the import process. After about two tries (first try failed for a different reason), I got 115 log files in my CRM trace folder (they consumed 1.1GB hard drive space on my poor VPC image). However those log files didn't give me much helpful information, except another error message that was thrown before the previously mentioned message, which stated that "Failed to import entity relationship incident_activity_parties", which I don't have any clue why it has happened either.

After about 30 minutes of experimenting and Google search, I gave up on this. A few folks in the community have been suggesting to muck around the customization xml file, which I am not so encouraged to go this path, as I believe that could possibly cause more problems in the long run that it actually solves.

[Update - Feb 28, 2011] I finally figured out what the problem is, I had Data Migration Manager installed on my server. As soon as I uninstalled DMM and the problem went away. Still a mystery for me, but I can now finally go with more recent rollups.