Weird occasional ?Network-Wide Word + Printing? problem
Recently, I?ve started experiencing a very unsettling problem on my clients network. The network is based on UTP Cat 5 cabling, Star topology with four 3Com cascaded dual speed Hubs. Network protocols are TCP/IP and NetBEUI. Three Windows NT 4.0 servers are on the network with one of them acting as the network print server. The network also has 35 workstations comprising of the following O/S?s – W2K Pro, Windows NT W/s Windows 98 and Windows 95. Most of the workstations run Microsoft Office 2000 while the older Windows 95 ones run Office 97. All MS Office applications have been installed to run from local workstations Hdd.
Occasionally and all at once (as if in synch), all Word applications across the network on the workstations freeze up. Wordpad on the servers, when tried, freezes up also. It has also been observed that during this weird session, the print server locks up too. During this period, Task Manager tool on the NT systems indicate that everything is fine ? no application is indicated as being in a ?not responding? state, no process is indicated as having held the CPU . The entire network is protected by Norton Anti-Virus Corporate edition which is automatically kept most updated and with a daily scheduled scan on each workstation.
Any assistance in solving this problem will be highly appreciated.
Denis
