Hi,

I work for a large company, running a domain with approx 550 PC's. We are on an NT domain with a PDC and a BDC with 2003 servers for everything else. Recently our File server began creating temporary Excel files, the naming convention of which is [FILE NAME].xls~R[RANDOM NUMBER].tmp. Also, when we delete an .xls file it will remain there, but when you go into properties only the General tab exists and whenever you try to do anything to the file it comes up with either the file or the temporary file you get access denied. This affects random files rather than all the files.

The server is also giving us a BSOD at least once a day. This is only during normal office hours when people are connected to it. We are getting one of the folowing 4 stop error messages when this happens: 0x24, 0x50, 0x7e or 0x8e. We have done extensive research into all 4 error messages and none of the solutions provided by Microsoft or other forums have worked.

After the raid array finally failed on our main file server (a Dell Poweredge 2850) we got a second server (a Dell Poweredge 850), stuck 4GB of ram and 2x 500GB HDD's in there and did a full file restore to the temp file server. After 5 days this server then also crashed and is suffering the same problems.

All our servers are running SP2 and are fully patched with our WSUS server. We have been down numerous routes over the last two weeks to try and solve this but around 50 people so far have drawn a blank.

Anybody seen a similar problem, or more importantly, a solution? A point in the right direction as to whats causing this would be helpfull.

Well I had similar errors on a windows 2003 x64 server, in fact the first three error codes you show are the main ones i was having as well. I finally narrowed mine down to one of the two sets of ram had failed I took one set out and it has been fine since. The scary part is we used crucial ram for all our new servers and thats the ram that is going bad as it seems in one server after another. Do you have the mini-dump files so someone can look over them to analyze what files are being shown related to the stop errors? I know mine was showing ntfs.sys most of the time.

Hmm after this much time, you may have been better off doing a clean install.

You might want to post one of those xls files, or possibly do a full Antivirus/Spyware scan first.

By the way, you did manage to remove all those tmp files ofcourse?

OK, we are 99% sure it's not hardware as the two servers having these problems are completely different setups. We have also run memtest86 on the main server with no problems.

When I say we did a full file restore, I mean we built the server from scratch and then restored all the files from backup.

Error 24 links to ntfs.sys however we have examined this file and it matches the server version exactly. All the problems we found said it was only a problem if the file didn't match the server version.

We have done a full virus scan using McAfee and Microsoft Malicious Software Removal tool.

I can't post any of the xls files here due to the size constraints and company policy.

With the temp files I have tried removing them. Sometimes we can remove them, sometimes they appear again. Yesterday, I did a search of the data drive for *.tmp and deleted all of them. Come in this morning and they are back again. These temp files date back to 1996. At least one temp file is available for every year between 1996 and 2008.

I have attached the minidumps.

Inside the 2 MiniDumps:

naiavf5x.sys fix for Server 2003:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/556066

Hotfix here (via request to MS)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832336

Edit:
Or just uninstall McAfee

Aha, I thought it might be McAfee. Thanks for that. Probably a very stupid question but how do you access the dump files?

The other thing is why now? We've been running McAfee fine for a couple of years and had no problems. Living without McAfee on our server could become a major issue in itself.

Microsoft(R) Debugging Tools for Windows(R)

Thanks for that.