SMTP Provider "waiting for a subsystem to start"

Avast Business Avast Server Protection
1

Hi All.

I’ve had Avast running happily on our Exchange 2003 server for a year or so now and it’s still ticking over fine.
6 months or so back I built another Exchange 2003 server for our DR site and it too runs avast. Being a ‘warm’ DR site it sits mostly idle and doesn’t get much attention paid until patching or installing software. Both servers are running Windows 2003 R2. The older one is SP1 the DR (problem) one is SP2. Both run Exchange 2003 SP2.

I noticed yesterday that only 2 out of 3 providers were running on the DR server. The SMTP one is greyed out and status is “the provider is waiting for a subsystem to start”. It was running 4.8.878 so I upgraded it to 4.8.1059 and nothing changed.

In the troubleshooting section I ticked “Delay loading of avast! services after other system services” and that made no difference.
Removing providers and reinstalling didn’t help. Stopping and start the Default SMTP site doesn’t help.

I’ve run out of ideas on where to look next.

Any ideas?

2

Hi All.

I noticed someone else having issues with providers after upgrading and took their lead.
I tried this:

  1. Remove avast and reboot
  2. Downloaded full version, installed and configured
  3. Ran update and rebooted

Initially (at the end of the day) it didn’t seem to help. When I came in this AM all was OK (although I forgot to configure proxy settings, thus auto updating was not working).

I hope this helps others in the future.

Cheers,
Mark