Running Exchange 2007 SP2 on Windows 2008 SP2. Clients are OWA and Outlook 2007. The System Attendant won't start on my server. In the Event Log, I see Access Denied messages. Questions - 1. What effect will this have on clients? 2. Will rebooting the server resolve this?

It shouldn't have any effect on clients, but you won't be able to do much in the way of adding new mailboxes or modifying existing mailboxes on that machnine because the address list services run as a thread on the SA service. Rebooting might help, but only if the Access Denied is bogus. The service should be running under the local system account and the system account should have full control on the "Exchange Server" directory and that permission should be inherited by the bin directory and it's children.--- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP

I read that the System Attendant 'forwards directory lookups to a GC for legacy Outlook clients, updates free/busy for legacy clients". I've also read that the SA is responsible for Exchange's connection to the AD. So I figured this maybe a big thing? Or less so in an Exchange 2007 and Outlook 2007 environment? Rebooting did fix it, but I'm curious to know what problems we'd see if I hadn't really.

Hi, >1. What effect will this have on clients? In Exchange 2007, System Attendant service has many fuctions, such as providing monitoring for Exchange Server, mantaining mailboxes, active directory looking up service and so on. So if System Attendant service is stopped, the monitoring, maintaining mailboxes and looking up service are not avaliable. But if System Attendant service is disabled, all the services depending on it can't be enabled. In the view of this, it has some effect on clients. >2. Will rebooting the server resolve this? After enabling Exchange server 2007, System Attendant service can't be enabled automatimally. So rebooting the server won't resolve this and you should start System Attendant service manually. Hope this helps. ThanksCognizant

Hi "In Exchange 2007, System Attendant service has many fuctions, such as providing monitoring for Exchange Server, mantaining mailboxes, active directory looking up service and so on" It was the AD lookup service that I was most concerned about. Surely, if this is not working and Exchange can't access AD, Exchange will fail?

Yes.Cognizant