Error message 1003,6

I have a process that sends a lot of email running on a machine that never reboots (ideally).  I encountered a condition that caused all emails to stop sending, with a popup box stating that the temp folder could not be accessed.  This happened even after rebooting.  I verified that the temp folder existed, and that the drive was not full (niehter was the case).

 

What is happening is that some temp files got "stuck".  Apparently, there is an internal mechanism in the scan utility that uses a 16-bit number as a counter to keep track of things being scanned.  It uses this number to generate a unique temporary file.  At some point, it is checking the temp folder for files and reading the highest value temp file name.  If there is none, it starts with 0.  The system is also not clearing the temp folder on reboot.  So, what happened is that there were thousands of "stuck" temp files for some reason, and the highest number was the close to the 16-bit max number.  This caused the engine to scan only one or two emails, and then start failing.

 

The solution is twofold:

 

1) Clear the temp folder ( del /q %temp%\*.* ) then reboot the system

2) Do step 1 as often as you send out about 60,000 emails (to give yourself some breathing room).

 

My current environment is Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.00.5002.333, running on Windows XP Pro SP3.

 

If there's any other answers to this, I'm all ears.  I hate to reboot the machine but right now that's all the solution I have.