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I had an issue today with one of my servers where logging in took a very long time. It's mainly used as a file server / active directory server, but also runs a nightly backup and virus scan. The server is about 4 or 5 years old, and is starting to get slightly full. The C drive has about 861MB of free space (out of a max of 12 GB), whereas the D drive (where the shared drives exist), has about 40 GB of free space (out of about 120GB).

Our nightly backup (managed by Symantec backup exec) did not run last night, so I am assuming the "slow down" was occurring last night as well (the backup has a 30 minute window to start, and if that is missed it will not run). When I accessed the server this morning, the login screen displayed a few error messages stating that the "SBEAgent" (or similar) had a run-time error. "SBEAgent" is the VIPRE virus scan process. The actual login process took about 30 minutes before the server became responsive. I also received a pop-up message from the APC battery backup utility notifying me that the battery was old, and that we should consider upgrading.

I did have a (hopefully) unrelated issue yesterday where a user had a virus on their system. The virus was called "Data Restore", and also included "TDSS" (aka TDL3 / TDL4 / Rootkit.MBR.Sst.a). I was able to successfully remove all traces of the virus, but I am including this as it may pertain to my server issue.

Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

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What does the event log say? Are you monitoring the resource usage on the server? – Chris Ting Oct 26 '11 at 13:33
I'll get back to you on the event log. I checked the resource usage -- only 2% CPU usage, and about 50% memory / page file usage (about 50% on each), so nothing in the extreme. – Anthony Oct 26 '11 at 14:01
Another note: The backup process ran from 11:00 PM until about 12:00 PM the next day. It usually runs in about 4 hours (finishing around 2:00 AM). When the backup process completed, the server began acting normally. While I could consider this as having solved itself, I'd like to see if anyone can help me determine the actual cause here. We use Symantec BackupExec as I stated in my question. All help / insight is appreciated. – Anthony Oct 26 '11 at 20:00

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