Exchange 2003 server hanging

[veru...@gmail.com]

Hi All,
I have a partner organisation which an associate has asked me
to help out with an exchange issue, but am having a deal of trouble
with it myself.

Environment:
2003 SP2 exchange server running exchange 2003 SP2 with all available
hotfixes for windows and exchange applied.

Issue:
At seemingly random periods, the server will hang. When hanging, the
screen goes grey, is non-responsive, can be pinged remotely, but not
managed via computer management (and services such as SMTP do not
respond)
When restarting, the server comes up fine and the exchange databases
come up after replaying the logs (soft recovery). A couple of times,
we have had to to restore the exchange databases when a soft recovery
has not worked, but 90% of the time, a soft recovery is enough.

Things done:
We have moved to completely new hardware with a new OS and exchange
install
Deleted the exchange databases and started from scratch (ie all
existing mail into a PST) <note we are not 100% that some users havent
moved items back into their mailbox!>
Removed all other software from the machine
Exchange BPA reports no errors or warnings only informational stuff
Run the exchange disk stress tool - and the disks were more than fine
Run eseutil tests across the databases (all pub and priv) with no
errors
Run isinteg over all databases with no issues
There are no warnings or errors in the app event log
Logging within ESM has been turned to to maximum for every available
type

Theorethically, between the new hardware, new OS install and fresh
databases, we should have everything covered, but we clearly dont!

Im leaning towards something a bit whacky... such as a corrupt rule
(which again should have gone when starting with fresh databases).

Im not so much after a solution (although that would be nice) but more
suggestions of additional tools i can try to narrow down what the
issue actually is. At the moment i have no idea if the issue is
hardware (unlikely after having moved servers), OS (Dont see how it
could be), Exchange databases (were deleted and rebuilt) etc - so any
suggestions as to how i can pin-point the actual issue would be great.

[jamestechman]

Anything in the event log before it hangs? Is there a dump file being
generated? Search you computers for any .dmp files. Does this occur at
certain time of day or random?

James Chong (MVP)
MCSE | M+, S+, MCTS, Security+
msexchangetips.blogspot.com