Why does viewing VSS cause OLE error 0x80041014?

I am trying to write some digital forensics software in python, which means I need a way to access volume shadow copies on windows. I am following this article from SANS https://www.sans.org/blog/using-volume-shadow-copies-from-python, using the following block of code.

import win32com.client

def vss_list(self):
        wcd = win32com.client.Dispatch("WbemScripting.SWbemLocator")
        wmi = wcd.ConnectServer(".", "root\cimv2")
        obj = wmi.ExecQuery("SELECT * FROM Win32_ShadowCopy")
        return [x.DeviceObject for x in obj]

My problem is that this function returns pywintypes.com_error: (-2147217388, 'OLE error 0x80041014', None, None). The same happens if I change the return statement to return obj[0]. I have looked to try and find an explanation of the error code and the best I have found is at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wmisdk/wmi-error-constants

WBEM_E_INITIALIZATION_FAILURE

2147749908 (0x80041014)

Component, such as a provider, failed to initialize for internal reasons.

I am not sure if this is what the code means, or what my problem is and how to fix it.

Thanks in advance for any help

Although this might not be the case in your situation one thing that causes me grief with VSS WMI classes is its architecture dependency. On 64-Bit OS this will not run from a 32-Bit process. Make sure your Python interpreter is running as a 64-Bit process.

From the Win32_ShadowCopy class documentation.

Note This class is unavailable for 32-bit applications on Windows Server 2008 x64. To access the class with Visual Studio, go to Project Properties, then General, and un-check the Prefer 32-bit box.

I hope this is all that is standing in your way.