Repeatedly Corrupted PST file / Outlook 2k

[msandona]

I have a user whose PST file repeatedly becomes corrupted. I run the inbox repair tool, the file is repaired and works for a short time. This week, each morning, when she started outlook she was prompted to repair the PST using the inbox repair tool. Since this is a regular occurrence, the user already knows how to use the inbox repair tool. However, this week she was unable to repair the PST file from her own work station. She contacted me and I was able to repair the pst using the tool on my work station. Yesterday, after I did the repair, the user tells me that Outlook worked slower and
slower as the day went on and then this morning again we had to repair the pst.

Here's a bit of background on our setup. Our workstations run Windows NT 4 sp6, and outlook 2000. I store the pst files for our users on our Novell 5.1 server so they can be backed up. The novell client version is 4.81. We
switched over to this set up after Lotus discontinued support for cc:Mail and until a exchange solution is worked out by our company. So we had a lot of users who had cc:Mail archives that were imported into Outlook. I have had one or two users who had an isolated instance of needing the inbox repair tool run on their pst but none other with the daily need for this file to be repaired.

I thought that perhaps something that was imported from cc:Mail was causing the corruption. So I created a second set of personal folders to store all her old crap. Then I created a new pst to handle all the new incoming mail and her newly created sent mail and folders. However, the old
crap pst is usually clean, it's the new pst that needs to be repaired.

Neither of the pst files are anywhere near 2GB, in fact larger of the two is about 5 and a half MB.

I have searched through the archives of this group as well as visiting MS's knowledge base and haven't found anything that quite matches my situation.

Thanks for your help.

Matt

 

[BradSQLGuy]

No one has replied so I will ask the obvious. Have you tried creating a new .pst and moving the files over to it?

 

[msandona]

Hi:

Yup. I tried that. I created a new .pst file for new items and put everything else in a seconde .pst file. The new one is the one that keeps corrupting.

Matt

 

[Fudgit]

Matt,

have you tried the user on a different client? Could it be the way outlook is working on this pc?

Jim

 

[msandona]

I haven't tried that. One thing of note, though: I moved the .pst for this user to her local drive to see if it was the PC and its configuration. She had none of the problems that she experienced with the .pst on the server. So this would fix the problem but I would really like to keep the .pst on the server for backup.

 

[Zelandakh]

Several thoughts - how big is the PST? The larger it gets the more unstable it gets IME. Running it across the network is asking for trouble too.

Why not just leave everything in Exchange instead of using pst files?

 

[msandona]

The .pst is tiny, 5 mb or so.

As for exchange, we don't have an exchange solution in place yet. The powers that be are sorting it out. this is our in-between solution.

 

[Zelandakh]

I assumed you had Exchange server as you posted the question in the Exchange forum!

How silly of me...

 

[msandona]

No, no, no. Silly of me. I've obviously posted to the wrong group. Terribly sorry for posting here.

 

[AdmanOK]

Microsoft's technet article Q297019 explains why PST files should not be used over a network - if backing up a PST file is that important then users should copy it up to their network drive on a regular basis.