BizTalk and the mysterious blue screen

A customer of mine has seen a few isolated incidents over the past year where their Windows Server 2003 machine “blue screens”, typically when they have been Stopping or Starting BizTalk bizarrely – this is particularly strange as BizTalk doesn’t “operate” in the Kernel so it’s hard for it to cause a blue screen directly.

Whilst in the scalability lab recently we saw this blue screen 3 times in the space of a morning all when stopping/starting BizTalk, we took the Crash Dumps and got PSS to analyse, it turns out there is a bug in Server 2003 (and 2000) with regards to Corruption in a I/O Request Package (IRP) list (whatever that may be!)

So it turns out not to be a BizTalk bug but a Windows Server bug, this is listed here as Issue 4, and the actual bug is detailed here. I’ve never seen the issue on my kit so you only need to get the hotfix if you experience the bug. If you need the hotfix contact PSS….  

It should be included with Server 2003 SP1 when it ships..

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 09, 2005
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  March 09, 2005
  We are in the process of migrating our system to BT 2004. We saw this happening serveral time in development. We were also wondering how Biztalk can cause Blue screen of death in Windows 2003....
  
  Do you have any idea when the SP1 ships?
• Anonymous
  March 09, 2005
  Release Candidate 2 of Server 2003 SP1 has just been announced:
  http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/downloads/servicepacks/sp1/default.mspx
  
  Should be released properly in the not too distant future!
• Anonymous
  March 09, 2005
  It seems to me that I had the same problem in the same configuration (WS2003 + BTS2004).<br><br>I do not know if you have installed the SP1 of BizTalk but, for me, it solved the problem.<br><br>Did you install the SP1 of BTS ?<br><br>Regards<br>Yves Peneveyre
• Anonymous
  March 09, 2005
  Okay, just seen your last post right now.<br>So, forget my previous message... :-)<br><br>Yves Peneveyre