A few months ago I brought a couple of 2010 custom workflows and some lists into our 2013 app.  All was working well, meaning the lists were calling the workflow and completing just fine.  This was up until the other day when all of a sudden the workflow started to fail.  I added some log messages (log to workflow history) to the workflow but found that the error was occurring after the workflow was done.  We finally were able to track down a ULS log that seems to indicate the issue. 

Legacy Workflow Infrastructure  Unexpected WinWF Internal Error, terminating workflow Id#........

Legacy Workflow Infrastructure  Unexpected System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null.  Parameter name: name  at System.Type.GetMethod(string name)  at Microsoft.SharePoint.WorkflowActions.CoerceActivity.Coerce().......

I don't have any column named "name" in the associated list.  The workflow items appeared to do everything they were supposed to, but after the error the workflow could not be called again on that list item, which would normally occur when the item is updated.  We are not sure what has changed in the environment to all of a sudden have the workflows fail like this.

Any thoughts?

Were there any updates on the SharePoint server, perhaps through Windows Updates?  Legacy workflows use earlier version of .NET framework (3.5) so it would be good to check if there were any .NET updates auto-applied.

Thanks for the reply.  The server is on a closed network and no Windows updates were made.  Other changes have been made though, such as applying certificates for https access, new DNS names, load balancing between two SharePoint installs, and adding user roaming profiles.  I believe some of these items had already been in place before we started to see this behavior but it is hard to tell.  I am sure it must be something in the environment but that error message doesn't help point it out.  I am hoping that someone else is familiar with that error.

Do you see this issue happening in existing workflow instances?  If you create a new item and start a new instance of the same workflow on it do you see the same failure?

I am wondering if this could be because of WorkItem property or Workflow data mismatch when existing instances of workflows are dehydrated back from the database to be executed. I am not sure, but changes in DNS names & load balancing etc., could have impact on the runtime in terms of incorrect correlation tokens as the data might have changed between the time the workflow was persisted to the database and extracted back to continue it's flow.

You can test by starting a new instance of this workflow and check if that completes successfully without this error.

Thanks Sridhar........  yes, the error continues to happen each time a new item is created (and thus a new instance of the workflow is executed).  The odd thing was that when I first encountered this error, I went to one of my other lists to test a different workflow.  That workflow did not fail, but once I made a change (added a log message) to that workflow and re-published it, the error started to occur in that workflow as well.  So now both workflows fail when a new item is created and the workflow is not called when the item is updated (it typically is called on item creation or an update).

Could you let me know the version of SharePoint Server 2013? Is it RTM or is it patched to March PU 2013 + subsequent CUs?