Microsoft

I figured it out with a combination of TaskInfo, Task Manager and RegMon. Essentially whenever a "desktop event" happens, like an MSN "online alert" or Trillian announcing someone logging in or logging out, the nhk.exe / dellmmkb.exe process will start leaking handles.

Over the weekend, my system decided to start getting flakey once I had 400k+ handles open, all by the dellmmkb.exe process.
Right now, after a few hours of use, it is already at 5000 entries.

So, until they fix this buggy app, it's getting uninstalled. I'll miss the OSD but I'd rather have a stable and working laptop.

Especially when you are using Squid as a transparent proxy. As time goes on, squid becomes more and more HTTP 1.1 compliant but until that time, your best course of action to prevent problems with WSUS is to set the WSUS server to only do 'foreground downloads'. You lose the ability of the WSUS server doing HTTP range-requests, but you also don't end up with a saturated pipe because your server and clients are constantly downloading updates over and over again.

Case in point: Before the WSUS client came out and the older versions of BITS clients were on the XP machines behind a Squid server, they kept trying to grab updates and failing, which ended up saturating the internet connection at the office this took place. Sure, you can set GPOs for BITS to only download a certain amount during certain hours but you would still end up with the same result.

Bottom line: If you are using Squid with BITS/WSUS, make sure all your clients have the BITS 2.0 clients - which you should have by default if you are using WSUS. If your WSUS server is behind the proxy too, make sure to download the WSUS Debug Tool from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/updateservices/downloads/default.mspx
and tell it to do Foreground downloads only.

If you don't want to bother with the debug util, you can also go into the WSUS SQL tables and modify table tbConfigurationC, and set BitsDownloadPriorityForeground to 1. The debug tool makes it a no brainer though.

As a side note, once I had all the client machines behind the WSUS server for updates, I ended up changing the BITS GPO to basically go "full blast" during off-business hours since the machines were no longer downloading any content from the internet but from the local server. That kind of traffic I'd rather have go as fast as possible if I can help it. Sometimes BITS tends to 'trickle' too much on the default settings.

Query the WMI property Win32_BaseBoard (I believe that's the right one) and check to see if it's made by "Microsoft". Until Microsoft moves into the motherboard business, it is a quick and dirty way of doing it.

It seems like the next versions of Virtual Server and/or VMWare should have some official way of doing this - even a simple 'isVM.vbs' or something provided.

So far it has done this to me twice and I'm waiting to have it leak on me again. I do believe the DellTouch programs are made by Netropia. I could be wrong.

Either way, after about 24 hours uptime, my XP SP2 box was acting a bit weird. I noticed in Task Manager that instead of having around 15k handles open, there were over 400k handles open! I traced it to DELLMMKB.EXE.

It is a bit overkill for SP2 since the HID Input service normally handles the volume knobs and other extra buttons on these keyboards, but I do like the OSD that DELLMMKB.EXE provides.

If it keeps leaking, it's going bye bye.

Worth looking into and implementing - I bumped into this when I was trolling the new KB articles for Exchange information and waiting for a tape to restore.

Instead of copying and pasting, I will just provide the link to how to do it - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907458

Don't confuse "Access-based" with Microsoft Access. Totally different concept.

I'm hoping the "gotchas" with reset ACLs will get resolved with Longhorn/Vista.

One of the main selling points of SP2 was the fact that you can force clients into cached mode. I'm (guessing?) that it is done with a GPO or some option buried somewhere in System Manager I simply can't find. I will look through the SP2 docs again but other people are having the same problem finding it.. It's not essential for my rollout but it sure would be handy to know. Anyone know?

Answered! Thanks to anonymous user JC:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/b/5/fb5c54af-fe5c-48e9-be97-f9e8207325ab/Ex_2003_SP2_RelNotes.htm

under the section "Enabling or Disabling MAPI Access per User"

I don't know which one I'm looking forward to the most. Most likely SQL 2005 since the last version was before 2000 with SQL 2000. VS 2005 is very nice but I'm still a bit puzzled with all the name changes of the different suites. We've got MSDN subscriptions, action packs, and MS certified partner licenses I believe. Worst case scenario I can always use the Express versions for my quick hacks at home and use the company ones when I'm at work. I like that type of seperation anyway.

Now I understand why Peachtree 2006 requires the console aka session 0... it's still using the BTrieve aka Pervasive aka "Oh god, the horror" backend.

A sad day indeed.

It better work this time.

Actually, this is more of a comment on how slow the 'wsusutil import' function works. Exporting the metadata from the SQL backend to flat files works great and fast. The import however, on a dual Xeon 3G machine with 12GB of RAM, took hours. Now, to be fair to WSUS, it was crippled with the MSDE backend, but I'm curious if SQL 2000 (or especially 2005 - I wish it would RTM, like, a few weeks ago) would give it a nice kick in the pants.

I don't like the idea of eating up a SQL license for a WSUS server, though, either.

R2 of Windows 2003 of course. I'm hoping in the Vista craze that this release doesn't get ignored because it has a lot of cool features that you can use without doing application validation all over again because it builds on top of Windows 2003 SP1.

I think it was a good design choice to do it that way. You install Windows 2003 SP1 (essentially) then insert disc 2 and it adds on all the specific R2 features. If you have some sort of application regression that some 3rd party won't support because they've never heard of R2, don't use disc 2 and try it again. If it is repeatable with just disc 1, it's something that would affect Windows 2003 SP1 also.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/r2/default.mspx

You essentially need a fast network card and a slow disk subsystem to ever see this problem but it is definitely worth noting.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907404

This explains it better than I can:

This problem occurs because the available memory has been consumed. The available memory can become consumed when the disk subsystem throughput is slower than the network interface. The cache manager should buffer the difference in throughput between the disk subsystem and the network interface. However, hotfix 839406 and security update 896422 bypass the mechanism to throttle back these incoming writes after the data exceeds a certain threshold. If large writes are sustained for a long time, other critical writes will be deferred for a long time. When this occurs, the computer may stop responding.

I haven't tried it myself but with all the backend changes made to SQL 2005, this does not surprise me a bit.
I'd be extra curious to see what it would do on an x64 box.

Seen here:
http://forum.olympiacos.org/blogs/venceremos/archive/2005/10/22/dimitrisv.aspx

This won't affect most people it seems.

[snip]

New Revision to be released for Office 2003 SP2

WSUS Admin update - A new (2nd) revision will be published for the Office 2003 SP2. In the previous update release of Office 2003 SP2, some AutoUpdate and Microsoft Update customers experienced installation failures, in most cases due to a damaged Local Installation Source, which in some cases is required for the SP2 installation. Because user interaction is necessary to resolve this problem, we have decided not to distribute Office 2003 SP2 to users whose AutoUpdate client connects to Microsoft Update. We have also attempted to mitigate the problem on Microsoft Update by changing the manner in which updates are delivered. While these revisions will appear to WSUS Administrators, the SP2 update content in this revision has not changed. There is no need to retest this SP2 update revision, or reinstall this revision if the previous version was successfully installed. This information will also appear in the revision notes of the update.

[/snip]

From: http://blogs.technet.com/wsus/archive/2005/10/20/412816.aspx

This is the stuff that is important to me at least:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;906669

You can find download links from there too. I think as of right now, the main Exchange web page still links the CTP release notes. Whoopsie.

Now if Dell would just hurry up and come out with the Windows Mobile 5.0 upgrade for the Axim x50v I'd be a happy camper. I want my own pseudo-Blackberry.

Visual Studio is also to have rumoured to RTM'd last Friday. I know the .net 2.0 runtime RTM is floating around already.

Another lesson learned today - this service does not exist on servers/machines before Win 2k3 SP1 and/or XP SP2. If you happen to do an overlay install on a Win2k3 SP1 machine with Win2k3 RTM (don't ask), you will be left with this stale service. If you don't set it to manual/disabled, it will happily eat up CPU time trying to launch.

Now I get to fix up other people's code so it works on SP1 - I'm in quite a catch-22 situation but I won't get into it. Trust me that I wish there was a better way about this. I normally never do stuff like that (Best Practices - yadda yadda yadda)