I do not know if this is an appropriate group or not, there is not
group for Win2K+3.

OS: Windows 2003 Server

We are experiencing some unexpected crashes that have some common
symptoms.

This machine is in a lights out data center and is far away, we have to
drive to get there. When the bells and whistles start going off, we
head there immediately and the machine is unresponsive requiring a hard
reboot.

It seems to start at or near an event we get in the Event Viewer

- Desktop Heap Allocation Error

This is an undocumented error. But we found a Microsoft KB article
that does not directly apply but seems related.

Article 824422

Back to the story.

- Just prior to that message (maybe 2-5 minutes) our programs start
failing.

- About 10 minutes after that message the machine is unresponsive.
When we get onsite, the machine does not respond to keyboard or mouse.
We kick the power button to get control.

There are some other symptoms that might be related that we cannot
explain.

We have the Virtual Memory set to fixed size pagefiles on both of our
drives (C and E) the size is fixed at 4 gigs each.

Our physical memory is 4 gigs.

Now what bothers us is that the pagefile.sys on the C drive sometimes
disappears for days on end. Then magically appears again. According
to our settings it should permanently be there. This has bothered us
for awhile.

Anyway:

Since the last time this happened I have started a trace log with the
performance program that comes with Windows.

At this point we do not know what is happening so we are tracing things
like number of processes, virtual memory etc.

Any ideas or comments on our condition?

Further, the above KB article recommended that we change a parameter in
the registry called SharedSection. We do not have that in our
registry, so I am unsure what to set it to, I want to make sure it is
large enough. There is a related entry in the registry called
CSRSS/CsrSrvSharedSectionBase and it is set to about 2 gigs. This
value is undocumented.

Thanx

Julian