installing service pack 4 (about to)

The theory behind that suggestion is that by following that procedure, you'll have a clean start and all the Exchange files will still be closed when you start the upgrade. If you don't do this, and you reboot and the services start and have to be shut down by the upgrade process, some of the services may not shut down cleanly and could, potentially, leave little Exchange turdlets in memory and elsewhere.

If you have the time, this is probably good practice. I myself have seemingly lead a charmed existance with SP4 and haven't seen problems from not doing this but it does increase the margin of safety.

paul

And you might want to do yourself a favour and disable any thrid party aps (esp anti-virus) before installing it. I have also seen problems occur when installing SP4 when people have the MSMail or ccMail connectors installed but not in use. As a preventative measure, you might want to remove those using the Exchange 5.5 setup if you are not using them

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