Change Guardian for Windows Causes exchange to go unresponsive. (NETIQKB71837)

When Change Guardian for Windows is pushed to the Security Manager agent on an exchange server with the 3 GB memory switch active, the server may become unstable or unresponsive. The primary symptom that we see is exchange keeps working for internal email, but looses its ability to activesync to remote devices (blackberry, outlook web ect.) The worst case is the server itself will go unresponsive entirely and force a reboot of the physical machine.

The only known fix currently is to exclude the affected computer from the CGW computer group in the Security Manager Dev Console. Then go to add remove programs on the machine affected, and reinstall the CGW provider from the machine. The last step is as soon as possible to a reboot of the server so the agent components in the memory will be removed.

To validate that the CGW drive is no longer loaded, execute the driverquery command from a command prompt, and then validate that cgw is no longer resident in memory.

We have found an issue where CGW does not clean up properly when a file is unsuccessfully opened.  This is a common occurrence on an exchange server, and we feel this fits the symptom of the performance issue that occurs in these environments.  This is further impacted in Exchange 2003 servers where the 3GB switch has been enabled.

Formerly known as NETIQKB71837

Currently, the upcoming SP1 for CGW 2.0 does not show this as addressed in the SP, however, we do feel like we will either substantially improve the situation or resolve it with this release.