Why Restart the SBS 2011 Exchange Information Store

If you’re on vmware and having trouble with the time changing by an hour every so often; then you’ll need to restart the information store on the sbs everytime you fix the time. Otherwise users will keep getting prompted to put in their credentials (which to the exchange server it looks like they’re connecting from an hour in the future or past).

Exchange Information Store Stuck on Stopping

Sometimes the service will ‘timeout’ while restarting and get stuck on ‘stopping’. If you’re like me, and you don’t want to restart the whole server to fix it- you’ve probably tried forcing the service to stop. If you try to force the service to stop you will get an “access denied” because that service is being run by the ‘local service’ account which means no access for you.

How to kill the service anyways

Open up task manager, don’t bother with the services tab, click on the processes tab. Terminate the store.exe process. Don’t see that process? Click on “Show processes from all users” in the bottom left corner. If that still gives you trouble, try sysinternals process explorer run with admin rights.

Don’t forget to get the service running!

After you force the service to stop, it should restart automatically, but if it didn’t- then open the ‘services.msc’ and start the ‘Microsoft Exchange Information Store’.

Disclaimer

As always, my liability for your use of this information is limited to the amount you paid me for it