Thanks for your reply - I was wondering if anyone was reading these!
I posted one in the BESR forum a couple of weeks ago, and have heard nothing. Since I can't get a trialware version of BESR to work, I won't be recommending it to my client. Hope they are happy with the $$ they saved by not supporting the trial. <g>
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Anyway, yes I did see that article you pointed out. However, like the other one, it refers specifically to tape drives, and we are backing up to a NAS device, which uses no drivers.
I am really not sure if this is even a Backup Exec problem, but since we are having no problems with the other stuff on the server (Exchange, Active Directory, SQL Server), we assume that BE is either the cause, or its inner workings are the cause, of the frequent failures. Of course, support says they don't support the NAS device, so it sucks to be me.
To be fair, support worked diligently to assist with this, and improved a number of things, and taught me a lot about how BE is configured.
My "fail during verify" problem has been reduced to a once in a long while issue, with a recent run of successful backups a week long. To achieve this, I had to make a number of small changes to the backup configurations, and I can't say which one made the difference. One of them was disabling AOFO. Since they don't charge for it any more (at least, not with the Small Business Server license), I guess we shouldn't complain if it doesn't work properly.
Anyway, for now, it seems to be working fine. I am not getting backups of the ntuser.dat files for all users, and have been told (not sure I believe it) that they are returned with a System State backup anyway. Once I am sure of that, I will exclude them, so my backup reports look clean.
Anyway, it just takes a few minutes to install the program,but it takes weeks (even months) to get it working properly.
Thanks for your input Ken...