outlook 2003 freezes and looses connection with exchange server 2003

One of our exchange servers has been having problems lately. When the
user is using outlook it often hangs up and looses connection with
the
exchange server / domain controllers. I constantly get the messages
outlooks cant find the Microsoft exchange server when I open up the
address book, distribution list, etc. if I right click the outlook
icon, hold ctrl and click connection status I see the dc's and the
exchange servers listed but I constantly get connection failures.

I have been in contact with Microsoft directly but they have been no
help whatsoever. They recommend I reboot my firewalls and switch
which
makes no sense to me since we have made absolutely no changes to
either one.


I was wondering if my faithful friends in the group here can lend me
a
hand. This problem has been going on for 10 days now. Netmon traces
and sniffer traces are showing no problems. Connection between the
dcs
and exchange look good. If I run the outlook client on the domain
controller I never loose connection and the problem doesn't exist.
Its
only when I am connected to clients machines on the floor and other
servers (terminal servers, citrix, etec)


Thanks in advance

"RC" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed) ups.com...
> I have been in contact with Microsoft directly but they have been no
> help whatsoever. They recommend I reboot my firewalls and switch
> which makes no sense to me since we have made absolutely no changes to
> either one.

I'm sure they did more than that. What other things were looked at?

What is your DNS scheme like?

--
Phillip Windell
www.wandtv.com

The views expressed, are my own and not those of my employer, or Microsoft, or
anyone else associated with me, including my cats.
-----------------------------------------------------

Sounds familiar to me, and took us a couple of months to finally trace it down.

Do you have a firewall or router between the clients and the directory
server(s), that could be dropping the directory sessions you saw fail in
"Exchange Server Connection Status"?

In our case, the router was dropping connections after an hour, but the
Windows client was expecting the session to remain up for 2 hours [default
setting]. The result was if a user's directory session was idle for over an
hour, the router dropped the session, then Outlook took 1 to 5 minutes to
reconnect when the user did anything that forced an address lookup, including
most often sending an email you had been working on for the last hour. Then
the Connection Status window would increment the fail count after it
succeeded in reconnecting, sometimes by two or three fails, depending on how
many retries it took.

The easiest solution was to set the router to keep the connections open for
2 hours, to match Windows expectation, but I think you could also propagate a
change through GP to reduce Windows' expectation to match the router's
setting. We did that manually using regedit for testing.

"RC" wrote:

> One of our exchange servers has been having problems lately. When the
> user is using outlook it often hangs up and looses connection with
> the
> exchange server / domain controllers. I constantly get the messages
> outlooks cant find the Microsoft exchange server when I open up the
> address book, distribution list, etc. if I right click the outlook
> icon, hold ctrl and click connection status I see the dc's and the
> exchange servers listed but I constantly get connection failures.
>
> I have been in contact with Microsoft directly but they have been no
> help whatsoever. They recommend I reboot my firewalls and switch
> which
> makes no sense to me since we have made absolutely no changes to
> either one.
>
>
> I was wondering if my faithful friends in the group here can lend me
> a
> hand. This problem has been going on for 10 days now. Netmon traces
> and sniffer traces are showing no problems. Connection between the
> dcs
> and exchange look good. If I run the outlook client on the domain
> controller I never loose connection and the problem doesn't exist.
> Its
> only when I am connected to clients machines on the floor and other
> servers (terminal servers, citrix, etec)
>
>
> Thanks in advance
>
>