Error connecting to the Exchange Management Shell - and no one can connect w/ Outlook or OWA

Question

Whew - I'm not sure what's happening but everything blew up this morning when another admin rebooted the server...
I can't connect to the Exchange Management shell - I get this:
[<servername>.<domainname>.local] Connecting to remote server failed with the following error message : WS-Management cannot process the request. The operation failed because of an HTTP error. The HTTP error (12152) is: The server returned
an invalid or unrecognized response . For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic. + CategoryInfo          : OpenError: (System.Manageme....RemoteRunspace:RemoteRunspace) [], PSRemotingTransportException   
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : PSSessionOpenFailed
And in digging around, re-running the sharepoint PSConfig appeard to be a fix for a related issue I was reading about, and since there didn't seemt to be any harm in running it again (I did find the technote and had manually ran it after SP1 was installed)
I ran it and this is an excerpt from the log:
09/08/2011 16:48:05  1  INF                      Entering function Farm.Clear
09/08/2011 16:48:05  1  INF                        Entering function CentralAdminServiceInstance.Reset
09/08/2011 16:48:05  1  INF                        Leaving function CentralAdminServiceInstance.Reset
09/08/2011 16:48:05  1  INF                      Leaving function Farm.Clear
09/08/2011 16:48:05  1  INF                    Leaving function Farm.TryIsJoinedToFarm
09/08/2011 16:48:05  1  ERR                    A failure has been encountered when trying to load the Farm
09/08/2011 16:48:05  1  INF                    Entering function StringResourceManager.GetResourceString
09/08/2011 16:48:05  1  INF                      Resource id to be retrieved is FarmIsJoinedFailureWhileUsingCommandLine for language English
(United States)
09/08/2011 16:48:05  1  INF                      Resource retrieved id FarmIsJoinedFailureWhileUsingCommandLine is Failed to detect if this
server is joined to a server farm.  Possible reasons for this failure could be that you no longer have the appropriate permissions to the server farm, the database server hosting the server farm is unresponsive, the configuration database is inaccessible
or this server has been removed from the server farm.  To diagnose this problem further, review the extended error information located at {0}.  If this problem persists, run this wizard again to disconnect from the server farm.  After disconnecting,
run the wizard again to create or connect to an existing server farm.
So I seem to have some massive permissions issues.  Is there any kind  of a technote or walkthrough that can step me through verifying what permissions should be where?  The connect to Internet Wizard won't complete complaining it can't configure
the email and to run it again.  That caused the Set Up your Internet Address wizard to not run, complaining you have to run the connect to Internet wizard.

Answer 1

Is there any update on the issue?
No.  I gave up and rebuilt the server - this time inside of HyperV!
It's definetly a problem of some sort of a problem with IIS, that much is obvious.  It's frustrating, because by not being able to get to the Exchange Management Shell it made recovery of the Exchange database VERY hard. 
The rest of this will be a bit of a rant so feel free to stop reading here if you like :) 
I'm pretty unhappy with the fragility of recovering an Exchange databas in general - there is a VERY narrow range of parameters to get mail back - and very many things that can prevent you from recovering.  Had I suspected that there would have been
1/10th the pain in recovering mail, before I tried to connect the clients to the new exchange I would have made .PST files for everyone - which would have worked since they all had cached .OST files, even if the clients couldn't talk to Exchange due to the
aformentioned IIS problems.  Anyway, it was a total nightmare, extremly frustrating and while many of my problems were probalby self-induced, the total lack of a coherant disaster recovery strategy has at least motivated me to be EXTREMLY diligent about
backups - and not just backups, but ensuring that the SBS backup is working and occasionally firing up a clone VM and doing a restore to ensure the one of two ways Exchange can be successfully backed up are indeed working.
With such an extreme dependence on IIS for client acces AND managemet of Exchange, there really, REALLY needs to be more documentation on how Exchange uses IIS, how to step through the registry and other low-level internals to troubleshoot and compare. 
I must have read just about every technet article and literallly hundreds of blog entries on recovering Exchange - but the lack of information about Exchange's integration and dependancies on IIS were the most frustrating of all.  Talk about putting all
your eggs in one basket and a huge single point of failure ticking time bomb!
And I think it was either SharePoint Express or an accidently applied SharePoint Express update that blew up IIS.  A few days after that update got applied the server was restarted, and that's when everything went completly sideways.  That's whats
even more frustrating - that so many applications are so dependant on a now essential layer is frustrating.  I realize SBS is an exception to the rule - generally Exchange is installed on it's own server and this isn't a remote possiblity, but any update
(or installer) that messes with IIS really needs to check the environment it's going to go into, and if there is anything at all that could possibly cause a compatibility issue, the update should "fail open" and not install wtihout explicit confirmation
from the admin that he wants to isntall it.  Then again, another admin either ran the installer or approved the SP Express update so that still may not have saved me  - but if he saw an explicit warning he probably would not have just clicked through
it!
Oh well - thanks for reading if you went all the way through.  I'm just glad that it's now over :)