Exchange 2007 Store.exe hanging

Recently when moving accounts between exchange servers we encountered an issue where store.exe would enter the hung state. This was very difficult to diagnose as there were no errors apparent in the event viewer. Symptoms appeared when mail began to pool in the mail queue waiting to be delivered.

From there it was apparent that the mail submission service was failing. The store.exe was still running however not responding. The service could not be stopped and would error trying to close.

After sending a mem dump of the running store.exe to Microsoft, they identified several accounts exhibiting issues we narrowed to an individual database. Creating the environment where the store.exe would fail was challenging until we realised the backup solution System Centre Data Protection Manager was running when the store.exe entered the hung state. When DPM attempted to backup these accounts recently moved to the affected database, the store.exe would hang.

To resolve this issue we have sent the database to Microsoft for analysis but needed to resolve this issue in the short term. To resolve, each account over 2gig in size was exported to pst and the SCANPST application was used oneach of the accounts until there were no errors (Only minor inconsistencies were identified). Once complete the pst was imported and the issue appeared to be resolved.

Our TAM outlined a previous issue where email imported during a migration to Microsoft products using a third party tool created a header too large for Exchange to handle causing exchange and the server to blue screen. As we used this third party tool but coming from Groupwise instead of Lotus Notes, it is conceivable that a similar issue could be causing this issue. The database has been sent to Microsoft to be analysed to look for such an issue. I will update this post with the result.