Major problems: Windows 2003, AD, and Exchange. Please help.

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From: Max (maximkh_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 07/20/04 

Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2004 19:58:49 -0400

Just got back from working about 9 hours on this damn thing. Would
really appreciate some 3rd party points of view.

Here's my setup:

Dell PowerEdge 700 Server
Windows Server 2003 Standard
Active Directory
DNS
IIS
Exchange 2003 Standard

I'm currently working on getting that thing up and functional for a
small ~20 person company. Up until today everything was going great,
server is running well all of those services have been installed and
configured. The last thing to get installed was Exchange 2003. I did
some basic config on it, tested for sending and receiving and everything
worked. Today when I came I had to restart the server for some
configurations to update. That's where I ran into major problems.

Now up until this point the server was restarting fine, but with
installation of exchange that changed a bit. First of all it took about
11 minuets just to shut down. That problem I've encountered before when
the AD and exchange are on the same machine, I already got a batch file
that I use for shutting down exchange services before shutting down the
computer itself. But the biggest problem happened when the computer went
back up, as it was doing all the tasks before showing the login dialog
it completely froze on the "Applying Computer Settings". In fact I had
enough time to go out and get some lunch, it sat there for about 2
hours. I didn't want to power it down at the risk of causing more harm,
but the login dialog did come up after that wait. I was able to type my
login credentials in, and what do you know, another Applying Settings
dialog.

Couldn't wait any longer this time, I turned off the system and tried to
restart in Safe Mode with networking, this time it froze on "Preparing
network connections" dialog. After another restart in Safe Mode,
everything came up. I figured this might have something to do with
exchange, so I set all exchange services to disabled, rebooted in normal
mode, and everything went just great. After I logged in I was even able
to start the services back up, but after attempting another reboot had
to go through the safe mode yet again.

I am completely lost at this. Have been doing non-stop google searches,
and besides the fact that there isn't a single thing on Windows 2003,
only 2000, there is also very little on this topic itself. Please help
me with any ideas you may have. I've already read about this being DNS
related, NetBIOS related, Group Policy related, etc... Going back there
at 7am tomorrow, would be great if I at least had something new to try.
Any help appreciated.

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