I've noticed similar strangeness after I run a nightly maintenance routine on one of my apps. It does packs and reindexes on a bunch of tables, so it opens them exclusively.

After this runs, users see big slowdowns running the app. When I boot them all out, I go in to server manager and I can see that the server still thinks a lot of the files are in use. If I manually close the files, all is well again.

I have no idea why this is, but maybe it will help you figure out your problem.


>We have a client that has a Windows Network. The server is running Win2000 server. The workstations are running Windows 98. There are a total of 5 computers.
>
>They originally called us stating that, as they were bring up our software on the 2nd, 3rd or sometimes the 4th computer it would lock up. Upon further investigation by going to the Server and looking at the files that were being opened by the workstation trying to bring up our software we noticed that the tables were being opened at the rate of one file every 20-30 seconds. Sometimes this can happen bring up the second computer into our application other times it might be the third or fourth.
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>As this computer is opening up tables extremely slowly we can try to copy files through explorer across the network which is not slow.
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>As these files are being opened slowly we check the performance on the server and the cpu usage and memory usage was low.
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>Another thing we noticed. As this computer is trying to get into our software and the files are being opened 1 every 20 seconds, if we exit the application at another computer then this slow computer opens up the remaing files instantaneously.
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>One other symptom is that this client states that yesterday all 5 computers got in fine and then after a little while one of the workstations started slowing down and then it locked up...2 minutes later another workstation locked up, 2 minutes after that another workstation locked up.
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>They have had the same behavior running Windows98, WindowsXP and Windows 2000Server on the server.
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>We have 100's of clients running our app on networks without these issues. We are at our wits end. The hardware consultant on their end swares its a problem with our software.
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>Any ideas? Help
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>Thank you,
>Paul Acton