Thursday, July 2, 2009

Exchange System Manager crashes when Help is accessed

My customer (the Singapore ministry one) called again today. It's regarding his newly migrated Exchange Server 2003. (Yes, 2003, not 2007. He's afraid to upgrade. I do not know why)

Today, the complain was that whenever he spawns the Exchange System Manager and accesses the Help, the ESM will crash. I asked him to try the ESM on the old Exchange Server. No problem, he said. 

Hmm.. How can that be? I had ensure both ESM and Exchange are of the same patch level before I left.

After some investigation, we found out that the only difference between the 2 Exchange servers is the IE version. The old server has IE 6, while the new server has IE 7. A quick search in Microsoft Knowledge-Base pointed to 

A conflict between the newer version of the Psapi.dll file that Internet Explorer 7 uses and the older version that Exchange System Manager uses

I'm left wondering why can't there be a hotfix for Exchange Server 2003 such that all cumulative fixes for bugs or conflicting .dll be packaged and released to all Exchange customers. 

This will save us a lot of time debugging.

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