Problems occur when renaming groups in Biztalk 2006 and how to ensure that they don't affect you.
A customer reported a problem with Biztalk Server 2006. The problem was that file receive locations did not appear to be picking up files reliably and on schedule. The one way that the problem could be reproduced was if the host instance was restarted during the time that the service window was active. In that case, if there were files in the receive location's directory, the files would never be picked up once the service window was over.
So the problem turned out to be the following. All of the hosts and host instances had been created. Then the Group name was changed. It does look like just a display name after all. But here's what happens.
If you browse to the following location in the registry
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\BTSSvc$BizTalkServerApplication
And look at the ImagePath, the group name is passed in when starting the biztalk service.
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\BTSNTSvc.exe" -group "BizTalk Group" -name "BizTalkServerApplication" -btsapp "{B4A4A1E5-B466-4CCF-99CF-68DF1D8819E5}"
But my group name is now DevGroup. There is a stored procedure called admsvr_GetGroupProperties that runs against the adm_group table to return properties. One of these properties for the group is @nCacheRefreshInterval which should be 60. In the case of the rename, the stored proc returns nothing and the default value defaults to something too high 60000 seconds.
The easy way to fix this problem is to simply delete and recreate the host instances which will put the correct group name in the registry for the imagepath. Alternatively, you could make the change manually in the registry. This problem doesn't occur in Biztalk 2004 since you can't rename the group there and does not occur in Biztalk 2006 R2.
JP's excellent messagebox viewer has been modified to warn in the report if the group name was renamed. You can get it here: