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The risk should be none if there is no hardware error looming on the system.<br />
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The only thing that can have an adverse effect is that if you have Exchange running on the system too, you will defragment the file exchange uses, but will fragment the data contained by the file.<br />
This will cause Exchange to have more work during its next internal defragmentation, which is hard on a heavily utilized Exchange server.<br />
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But for the rest, there should be no problem what so ever.
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The risk should be none if there is no hardware error looming on the system.

The only thing that can have an adverse effect is that if you have Exchange running on the system too, you will defragment the file exchange uses, but will fragment the data contained by the file.
This will cause Exchange to have more work during its next internal defragmentation, which is hard on a heavily utilized Exchange server.

But for the rest, there should be no problem what so ever.

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Jan... is right. &nbsp;However, I have also read some recent articles where a number of different defragmenting tools were done on regular PCs and the end results across the board was that there was no significant increase in disk access speed for having taken the time to do the defrag.
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Jan... is right.  However, I have also read some recent articles where a number of different defragmenting tools were done on regular PCs and the end results across the board was that there was no significant increase in disk access speed for having taken the time to do the defrag.

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Thanks for the help and advice.
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What risks are there when running Windows defragmenter on a Windows domain controller?<br />
In addition to the domain controller duties this machine is also running the software and databases for several client-server applications. &nbsp;
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What risks are there when running Windows defragmenter on a Windows domain controller?
In addition to the domain controller duties this machine is also running the software and databases for several client-server applications.  

Risks when defragging a Windows domain controller

This topic area includes legacy versions of Windows prior to Windows 2000: Windows 3/3.1, Windows 95 and Windows 98, plus any other Windows-related versions including Windows Mobile.

Windows OS

The Microsoft Server topic includes all of the legacy versions of the operating system, including the Windows NT 3.1, NT 3.5, NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 and Windows Home Server versions.