Outlook 2007 hangs intermittently, DLO11d and Vista

[Robert_Dahlberg]

Hi

Scenario:

1. User moves a big mail (10 Mb+) from his mailbox to his pst-file.

2. DLO detects the move and adds the mail to the pending files list.

3. The backup start after about 15 minutes as we have our schedule set on that time.

4. Outlook hangs several times during the backup. First one time when the mail get copied locally and one time when the mail get copied to the NUDF.

5. The time it takes for DLO to copy the file locally and to the network coincides with how long time outlook hangs. This makes it impossible for a user sitting on a slower connection to move large mails in outlook.

This is probably a problem with how MAPI works. It seems that only one process at a time can access the pst-file. This leads me to believe that the hangning occurs when dlo accesses the pst-file. I am fine with that the pst-file access get interrupted, but I dont like that outlook hangs completely, it should be possible to work with the inbox at least.. In earlier versions of outlook and DLO, this wouldnt happen..

If someone here has the same config as me, could you please test my findings and reply. So that I can be sure that the problem lies with DLO and not something else in our config.

Best regards,

Robert

[Kelly_Harper]

Robert, we are experiencing the exact same behavior and I can confirm that DLO is at the very least contributing.  The problem goes away immediately if we shut down the DLO agent on the client system.

We're working through the issue as well so unfortunately, I don't have anything to offer as a solution yet.

[Robert_Dahlberg]

Nice to hear that someone else has this problem. Have you opened a case with symantec regarding this yet?

Regards,

Robert

[Kelly_Harper]

It took us a while to narrow down the culprit so while I have a case open with them, it isn't specific to this issue yet...that will change in a few minutes when I call back :)

Interestingly enough, we didn't see any of these symptoms with Outlook 2007 until we updated to SP1 in the middle of January.  I think you're dead on in that it has to due with the MAPI subsystem so I'm hoping they have some ideas.

I'll post updates here as I get them.

[Robert_Dahlberg]

Looking forward to hear from you again. You can always refer them to this thread..

[Kelly_Harper]

After more testing and troubleshooting on our end, it appears specific to Office 2007 SP1.  We removed Office 2007 SP1 for a few users and these symptoms disappeared.  We will be testing with one more user in a few hours at which point I will contact Symantec with the results.  They've asked me to run a client level DLO debug so that we can reference that as well.

[Robert_Dahlberg]

I think we have had a similar problem without sp1 for office 2007, but we havent done enough testing to confirm that. The problem is that we need SP1 for 2007, as we are using an application that requires it.

I have now downloaded backup exec 12 and we will try to upgrade a couple of users to DLO12 to see if this may fix the problem. The client is backwards-compatible with the 11d-server so we only have to upgrade the client. 

[Kelly_Harper]

That would be music to my ears if that resolves the issue.  I would much rather deploy Backup Exec/DLO 12 than have to remove Office 2007 SP1 from all 800 client machines.

[Robert_Dahlberg]

Hi

We havent deployed SP1 for office yet but still see the problems. With DLO12 we can still see the hangning problem but its much better. Have you tried to use DLO12 yet? Do you still have a case with symantec and what do they say about this. It should be fairly easy to replicate the problem for them..

Regards,

Robert

[Robert_Dahlberg]

have you excluded the pst.tmp that are created when pst-files in outlook 2007 are accessed? We discovered these files just recently and saw that they werent excluded in our backups. We think they can make outlook go very sluggish if DLO also is trying to backup them.. Just a theory...

[Kelly_Harper]

Very good info Robert, thank you for sharing!  I was hopeful that we weren't excluding pst.tmp files but I just verified that we have a global exclude set for *.tmp.  We haven't upgraded to Backup Exec 12 yet due to the size of our Backup Exec deployment and other competing priorities :)  As it stands, we are still working with Symantec to troubleshoot this issue but I will be sure to post updates as we get them.

While we continue to work with Symantec, we decided to deploy Windows Vista SP1 on a few of the troubled systems and to date they have reported that the issue went away after Windows Vista SP1.  We're pursuing that with additional testing on our end.  Here's hoping...

[Robert_Dahlberg]

Have you looked in the Network user data folder for the file? In our setup, this file exists there even though it is excluded. We have noticed that every time something is accessing the pst-file a pst.tmp-file are created. They are also created on the server when DLO moves mails to the backup-pst. This causes our server to be under more load since we deployed office 2007.

DLO12 made our problems smaller, but they havent gone away. We have a few users with very big pst:s and these users still see big problems in outlook during a backup.

[Kelly_Harper]

We are beating our head against a wall; both Symantec and Microsoft have been unable to provide an answer to this situation.  If we disable DLO completely or disable the feature to incrementally backup .pst files...the issues seem to go away.  The challenge with that is that .pst files don't get backed up in that case until the employee closes Outlook, which only happens when they are going home...so no dice :)

This is one of the most frustrating and baffling issues I have ever had to work on as we can't track down the cause.

[Mandar_Sahasrab]

Hello,

What are the version numbers for BE 11d and DLO? Is the version number for BE 11d 7170 or earlier? Also I heard that DLO in 11d did not have Vista support and Symantec's official version for Vista / Longhorn support is BE 12. BE 11d was pre Vista release and Microsoft has done lots of changes in the OS (Vista and Longhorn) for which many software vendors had to change couple of things in the source code; and that includes Symantec too.

One day I found this on the net http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/html/itp/Symantec_Top_10_Reasons_Upgrade_BE12.pdf

- WinCPP

[Robert_Dahlberg]

We have upgraded to BE12. It had no effect on the issue..

[SYM_USR]

Hello.

New to the forum and hope I am not speaking out of line on this topic but...

I had similar issues but not with Vista, rather XP. The issue was with the MAPI versions being used.

The fix was to run Windows\System32\fixmapi.exe and reboot. This also addressed indexing problems in Outlook 2007 SP1 when using Windows Desktop Search 4.0 if anyone cares.

Hope this suggestion helps.

[Kelly_Harper]

Not to kick a dead horse but has anyone found a solution to this issue yet?  We have identified a replacement product so I thought I would double-check before moving forward with replacing DLO.

I was hopeful about fixmapi.exe but it did not resolve the issue for us.  After working on this issue for over a year we are ready to move on.

[Robert_Dahlberg]

We have taken the pst:s out of the equation. We are now using a Citrix-server where our users can archive mail. And with no pst:s on the workstation DLO runs fine (although the logging-functions and user interface could be much better).

What replacement product have you found? I thought all these backup-softwares had trouble with pst:s?

Best regards,

Robert

[Kelly_Harper]

We considered doing away with .pst files as well but we're not in a position to do that anytime soon :(  As much as I would love to resolve this issue and continue using DLO, over a year of working on this issue has been enough so we are working on a pilot of http://www.ironmountain.com/digital/pc/.

[sanjay_mundra]

This is an issue with MAPI specifically on Outlook 2007, solution for this issue is available in latest release for NetBackup DLO i.e. 6.1 MP4 and will be available in next release for BackupExec DLO.