Workstation service under XP SP3 failing

[TheCrust]

This post is in relation to this thread, posted by my senior feeder school tech some time ago:

Drive Mapping woes

The workstations are all clean-build XP Service Pack 3, deployed from WDS and operating in a native Windows Server 2003 domain.

As with all primary schools, there is the usual plethora of wonderfully reliable software installed (even workshark!) - but none of the usual crud bloatware that comes with PCs from new such as the inevitable free PDF utility, google desktop etc..

It seems the workstation service on these machines is terminating randomly - there are no entries in the system or application logs to indicate why the service is stopping, or an application that may be tripping it up. The service just.... .....stops.

A reboot will bring it all back to life, but the fix isn't permanent and machines are having to be regularly restarted - not ideal in a classroom environment when all the teacher wants is for stuff to work as it should.

Does anyone have any ideas? I have a feeling it's related to SP3 itself but can't put my finger on it and a quick google turns up nothing useful.

Thanks in advance!



Jim

[Potato-Peeler]

May sound stupid but would you consider putting a sp2 install on a machine as a test?

[dwhyte85]

Are you up to date with patches on SP3?

The other potential issue is a virus/piece of malware - we had something similar at my last work where something kept kicking it of, an update of sophos & a malwarebytes seemed to fix the issue.

[korifugi]

Are you up to date with patches on SP3?

Yup - I fully updated one machine manually as I thought this may be causing the issue, but alas - still seeing the issue.

I'll attack one of the machines with adware/malware removal software next time I'm in to see if anything of that nature is doing it...

I'm pretty sure it's not a virus as AVG is happily updating and scanning (and catches the occasional gifts people like to bring in on USB flash drives!)

I've considered an SP2 image test but this issue was seen by a couple of users before the re-image (they were using SP2 then), but the issue was nowhere near as bad as it is now.

[Potato-Peeler]

Possibly a server issue then?