Conference decwet::windows-nt

5657.0. "Net DDE Hanging" by CUJO::TOBIASSEN (Ride a Bicycle for Fun & Fitness) Fri Feb 07 1997 17:53

The following is submitted by my customer.  Any help is appreciated.

MS Windows NT 3.51 problem report.
For the past two weeks,  my network of 26 Windows NT worstations and 2
Windows NT servers have suffered a problem with the Net DDE services
hanging.  This problem has finally been resolved,  but since I could
not find record of this particular problem on the Microsoft web
page,  I would like to either have a formal problem report filed.
If this is a problem that is known about,  I would like to be
informed of the most likely cuase of this problem.

All the 28 systems are in a common domain,  running NT 3.51,  service
pack 5.  We are using Hummingbird's NFS Maestro for NFS
connectivity to UNIX servers,  connecting to LPT8:.  This
printer connection uses the Windows SMB protocol,  whereas all
the other printers are being used are mapped to LPT2:
through LPT7: using the NFS protocol.

Since this was the first printer to be physically attached
to an NT server, messages from the print spooler on the server
were not wanted.  To stop these messages, the messenger
service was changed to manual startup, and was therefore
not started on the machines.  This did stop the messages
from popping up on the screens, but this started to cause problems
elsewhere. The first time a user would log on after a system
reboot,  the Net DDE Agent would hang for a few minutes,
and then finally appear to go away.  It was not sure at
first if the problem was in the Net DDE Agent,MS
Office (which starts theNet DDE Agent), SMS Package
Commander, or SMS Inventory Control.

Looking through thesystem event logs,  two messages appeared.
The first was "The Network DDE service hung on starting"
and was followed by "The ClipBook Server service depends on
the Network DDE service which failed to start because the
following err:  After starting,  the service hung in a start
pending state."  Without the DDE service running,  any user
attempting to use DDE would be forced to wait indefinitely
until they logged out,  and logged back in.  This has been
apparent in loading any file from the File Manager that is
associated with MS Word,  MS Excel, and MS Access (since
their associations make use of DDE),  starting up Frame
Maker, and using any DDE linked information in these
programs, and Corel Draw.

Logging back into the system after a logoff did appear
to be a work around for this problem since the Net DDE
Agent tried to restart it's services successfully.  A final
fix to this problem was discovered when the decision was made
to see if the Messenger service being turned back on would
resolve the problem.  With this fix in place,  the print message
problem was fixed by adding the REG_DWORD value of 0 to
\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\
Providers\NetPopup.

Norman Lyon

                                     

	This has nothing to do with your problem, but please be warned that
  you should upgrade your version of Hummingbird's Maestro to at least version
  5.1.3 before you upgrade your systems to NT 4.0.  There have been a number
  of reports that NT 4.0 will crash with previous releases.

		Danny

    Thanks for the advice Danny.  I'll pass that along to the
    customer.   Any ideas for other places where I might post
    this note.  The customer asked today if there was a response.
    
    Tom