Hi
I am experiencing intermittent problems with our own Internal Delphi 7 programs that have been written in-house and used on a Novell Server (Netware 6) / XP Client system for years without major problems. We run about 10 different apps, with some 40 users on our system. No more than 5 users typically use an individual application at any one time.

We have recently upgraded to MS Server 2008 & MS Terminal Server 2008 Standard Edition. Our applications now run under the MS Server 2008 environment. ie Applications and databases are stored on the file server, the users launch RDP sessions and run the applications from here.

As mentioned, the programs have been written in Delphi 7 and have a database back end using DBASE database files. We use the Borland Database Engine and a mapped drive system to allow the clients to talk to the databases. For historical reasons, the applications are really client side applications i.e. all of the SQL and database handling is done within the application. In the future, I would hope to change this to a true client/server methodology. However, due to the scale of the work to do this, it is just not feasible to do this right now (probably 5+ years work in all!)

The other difference now is that the BDE used to be installed on each clients PC, however, now that we are running a thin client system, the BDE has to run on the Server. This on the whole seems fine but I do wonder if the BDE is causing me problems ?

When I check the File Servers event log, the first Error I see, when the application falls over is typically as follows (I have given our WH4WIN app as an example, it is very similar for all other apps):

++++++++++++++++
Faulting application WH4WIN.exe, version 4.2.4.55, time stamp 0x2a425e19, faulting module ntdll.dll, version 6.0.6001.18000, time stamp 0x4791a7a6, exception code 0xc0000006, fault offset 0x0002dc8d, process id 0xee8c, application start time 0x01c948a74782c37d.
++++++++++++++++++++

When this happens, I have to get all users to close the application. Then, the problem is cured. I did have a few ideas that I have implemented without success, they are as follows:

1. I added all of the apps to the Anti Virus Exclusions list as I
thouht that maybe the antivirus was causing a problem.
2. I have turned off DEP for the same applications.
3. I was convinced that Local Printer shares were causing issues so have now connected them directly to the LAN.

I don't think it is a database locking problem, as the applications will typically handle this and just report that they cannot get an exclusive lock to write to the database at that time rather than simply crash.

My question is has anybody else, whether they are running MS Server 2003 or 2008 using the BDE and Delphi7 WIN32 apps experienced this type of problem ?

Any suggestions would be much appreciated as I am running out of ideas.
Regards
Martin