Ghosted Free+Busy and OAB

bnettles why did u give me the points?it was unneccessary.
did u try ADSI to delete the ghost folders?did it work?
if that did not work tell me i will give u a utility from microsoft to change ADCL's
on public folders so u can take ownership and delete it.

ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/PSS/Tools/Exchange%20Support%20Tools/PFDavAdmin/

I gave you the points because you gave me enough information and I'm not stingy! =)

I have PFDavAdmin ... I'll look at the docs and see how I go about doing this for one OAB folder ... is it pretty easy to use?

Hmmm ... doesn't seem to launch ... I get "The procedure entry point LdapTypeFreeLdapModList could not be located in the dynamic link library adslpc.dll" ... I know I've at least launched this utility before ... do you know if there is an issue running the utility once Win XP SP2 has been loaded?

i dont have sp2 for xp yet(will wait a few more weeks to see if it is worthed)but
i have the utility on my exchange and it works.it is very easy to use.just read the doc.
PS:i have this utilty on a test server.MS does not support it .

After changing the permissions it looks ok ... but I still get prompted for a password in System Manager, when I try to delete the object ... if I go back and click on the folder in PFDavAdmin, I get "Exception getting events: The remote server returned an error: (501) Not Implemented." - I'm sure this is because it is a ghost object but still unsure if I committed the changes properly ... I'll look a little more and see if I can figure out what I'm doing wrong ..


I looked for the objects in ADSI but couldn't find them ... do you know where they are located by chance?

open adsi\Domain\Microsoft exchange system objects and see if u can find the dupilcates there.if yes right click and see if u can delete it.

ok ... I removed them ... will give it a little while for replication to occur and then give you an update

I removed the ghosted objects in adsi\Domain\Microsoft exchange system objects but they are still there in System Manager ... should've been enough time to fully replicate ... do you think there are other pointers in Config somewhere?

sorry kido if adsi did not do it then i dont know what will.as a last resort
restart ur exchange and DCs(praying wont hurt either)and see if that would get rid of ghosts.If that was a small and simple organization i would have deleted exchange completely and reinstalled and imoprted data back.but in ur situation
that may not be possible(reconfigure clients and reconect mailboxes).

hehe nothing is ever simple when you have 9k users ... thanks for the help ... I'll keep hunting ... I've got a couple of cases open with MS development so I might bug one of the exchange guys and see if I can pry info out of him lol

thanks again

bnettles that would be nice(dont close this problem).if they come up with a solution that worked please post here.take care and good luck.

Evan Dodd (http://blogs.msdn.com/evand) was nice enough to provide me with an answer - I can finally sleep =), those ghosted folders were driving me crazy!  


"These normally go away on their own after 6 months (actually 180 days) as part of the online maintenance nightly process. They're actually stored in the information store itself rather than in the AD, so that's why you're not seeing them with ADSI. You can help them along by following the steps in this KB:

323732 XADM: You Cannot Access Public Folder Data
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=323732

Particularly, see the "Age Folder Tombstone" part of the process. See JeremyK's blog on online maintenance processes for more detail and configuration: http://blogs.msdn.com/jeremyk/archive/2004/06/12/154283.aspx"

I was not sure whether or not I needed to give Vahik the points or close it ... he did give me some good information, but not the complete answer ... we agreed to leave the question opened until I had the answer from MS ... I don't mind awarding him the points for his efforts ... what do you think Vahik?

Bnettles73 points are all urs.i actually owe u some.i also would like to thank u for posting the solution.take care and good luck.