Windows 7 / Server 2003 (SBS) Network Problem

#Chri5# · 22 Mar 2012 at 16:02

We've just added two new PCs to a network.

PC : HP Pro 3300, W7 Pro x86 SP1
Server : SBS 2003 (Server 2003 SP2, Exchange 2003 SP2)

I believe these are the first two Windows 7 PCs at this site and we're getting some grief from them:

Two important applications which access mapped drives keep crashing with errors that point to network problems (eg "Error : Can't access directory" - the directory being on a mapped drive)
Outlook 2010 will, at random intervals, write two events into the Application Log saying it has lost the connection to the Exchange Server, then when it reconnects a few seconds later
W7 NTP client sometimes reports it cannot set a domain peer to use as a time source because of a DNS resolution error

Fixes we've tried:

Updated the PC NIC drivers to the latest from Realtek
Disabled RSS, Autotuning and Taskoffload on the W7 client
Turned off Green Ethernet and Flow control on the W7 client NIC
Created static records in the hosts file on the W7 client - NTP messages haven't returned but the other problems persist

DHCP, DNS etc is all done by the SBS server. That's the only DC for the domain as well.

It's almost seems that if you don't use an application for a few minutes, sometime things out and then the app bombs. Anyone come across anything like this before?

#Chri5# · 22 Mar 2012 at 22:14

We have another customer running one of the app's which keeps flouncing out on the same model of HP PCs, running from drives mapped from Server 2003 and we've had zero problems with those sites. So we know the app is happy on W7P x86 (the ISV doesn't support x64) on the same hardware.

I did kill off VirusScan on the SBS server later on this afternoon and that might have helped. We've got somebody going to site in the morning to follow up - they've got some Intel PCIe NICs with them.

#Chri5# · 23 Mar 2012 at 10:51

Thanks for the suggestions.

The app's don't support UNC (AFAIK), so it's mapped drives all the way.

One of the PCs has bombed this morning with an Intel NIC in it, so it's not the Realtek NIC. Going to try a different switch next.

#Chri5# · 23 Mar 2012 at 17:07

We've had to pull the PCs out for now, so we've set one up on our office LAN to see if Outlook throws any fits over the weekend.