Pearson Vue, OCR tesing, "Delayed Write Failed"

[CapnPugwash]

Hi,

My school is running the Pearson Vue / OCR software in one of our computer rooms.
All the computers are running XP, with the latest service packs / updates installed.

We have one machine in the room as the dedicated 'server' - all the other machines write their result file back to this machine, which then uploads the results files to Pearson Vue.

The tests frequently freeze or crash on different machines with this message:
"Windows - Delayed Write Failed : Windows was unable to save all the data for the file [name_of_the_file_you_want_to_save].
The data has been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection. Please try to save this file elsewhere. "

the problem doesn't occur all the time and it doesn't always happen on the same machines.
this room is heavily used and we never get any complaints about network issues

Has anyone seen this before? Any ideas of tests I could run to try and find where the problem might be?

Cheers!

Capn Pugwash

[ChrisH]

The hard drive is failing. I have seen that message many times, often accompanied by reboots with scan disk and lots of orphaned files.

[CapnPugwash]

Hi, thanks for the quick reply.

I presume you mean the hard drive on the machine that the clients write the results files to?

There are 15 or so client machines in the room. All of them have successfully completed a test at some point, equally most of them have had the 'Delayed write failed' issue... it's unlikely that all 15 client machines had hard drive issues.

As said before; this room gets plenty of use and it's only this OCR test that seems to cause us problems.

[CapnPugwash]

Ah ha! We are running Symantec Endpoint Protection. Uninstalling this seems to resolve the problem. Looking on the web, it seems like I'm not the only one with this issue - now I've just got to find a solution!

[round2it]

exclude everything to do with VUE