weird issue with Windows locking up on a file

[Jasen]

We have a Win7 box setup as an unofficial file server, mostly just to hold install scripts and packages. Very low volume, and only a handful of us use it. The main share is on a RAID0, basic Intel SATA raid card that came in the Dell Precision.
The problem is, every once in a while it will start locking up a file somewhere. Never the same one, but usually it will be .exe. And by "locking" I mean that any client that attempts to open it will essentially freeze up (explorer becomes unresponsive). Rebooting the server resolves the issue, but it also hangs the server up as it shuts down, requiring someone to physically cut power on it.
Chkdsk and system file checker never find an issue. Nothing in the event logs. The files are not corrupt, they work fine again after the reboot.
I tried running Process Monitor to see if some other process is somehow attached to the file in question at the time, but it really didn't show anything.
Intel raid utility reports everything is healthy.

Any other suggestions for avenues to check down to see what could be causing this issue?

 

[cdogg]

Has this worked before sharing the same files from another location across the network? If this is a new implementation that you are trying to get to work for the first time, then perhaps it is the program itself is just too unstable to run from a network location. Verify with the vendor who developed the app that it is known to work from a networked location.

I understand that you said it's not "always" the .exe file that locks, but it could be that someone is executing the .exe while others are accessing other files. So while it appears that the .exe sometimes isn't the cause, it might very well be every single time. The test here would be to remove all .exe files from the "file server" location to get them out of the equation and see if the same issue reoccurs.



-Carl
"The glass is neither half-full nor half-empty: it's twice as big as it needs to be."

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[Jasen]

Definitely not a new implementation. We used to house this on a different Win7 box, but upgraded to this Precision a few months ago. The problem started with the new workstation. Most of these are either batch files or custom installer packages we put together. We can run them dozens of times with no problems, and sometimes a two or three weeks will go by without issue. Then suddenly we'll go to run a script one day and it'll freeze up on one package or another. I go down, kick the server, and the script will re-run just fine.

I thought perhaps we were bouncing off the 5 connection limit of Windows 7, however I've verified the number of open sessions in the MMC snap-in.