I am running Exchange Server 2000 with Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition 8.1.
Last week my boss was complaining that when sending/receiving, it would “hang� at a certain percentage (usually around or below 50%) and time out.

No one else was having problems sending or receiving e-mail. The next day, there was a message from Symantec antivirus saying that I should scan all drives; apparently a virus had been found in an e-mail and it instructed me to scan all other drives in case the infection had spread. I found some documentation on Symantec’s website listing specific files that should not be scanned during realtime protection or a manual scan on an Exchange server; it said that including these files could result in erratic behavior. I checked to see if the files Symantec stated shouldn’t be scanned were in fact being scanned. They were, and I had a manual scan set for daily at 8:00pm. I edited the scan to remove the files, and when I tried to save the settings, the blue screen of death appeared with the following message: ***STOP***: 0x0000007F (0x0000008, 0x0000000, 0x0000000, 0x0000000) UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP. Underneath it a counter was going telling me that it was dumping memory.

The computer rebooted itself; I tried one more time to edit the manual scan and got the same error, memory dump, and reboot. When I went into Symantec and clicked “scan drive� and removed the files from there, (without trying to save) it worked fine.

Yesterday, I had a colleague complaining that he was trying to send a message to a customer and it was being bounced back immediately after clicking send.

It eventually went through after several attempts. He was able to receive and send other messages with no problem.

Today the same colleague complained again of sluggish e-mail first thing in the morning and said that a customer had tried to send him an e-mail and he never received it.

I have installed some performance counters and logical counters in the performance monitor to try to see what is going on with these sluggish situations; I’m a bit concerned about two in particular. One is the RPC operations/sec; this one has an average of 0.004. The RPC requests are at a minimum, maximum, and average of 0.000.

Any ideas and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Thanks for the advice, TKS. I followed the instructions in the Symantec document about adding a registry key and re-booted the system. Unfortunately, when I went in to configure the realtime protection and eliminate the files that should not be scanned by realtime/manual scans in Symantec and clicked "ok" to save my changes, the server crashed and gave me the same error again, performed the memory dump, and rebooted. I am running Symantec AVF for Exchange in addition to having the Exchange server being configured as an unmanaged client....do you think there is a possible conflict between the two applications?

This could even be a conflict with hardware as well...there hasn't been any hardware additions to this computer has there? Possibly could be a software driver problem as well...some investigative work here on new installed stuffs is in order...