I have been running a scheduled weekly shutdown/Reboot of my NT Servers for several weeks now(AT-Shutgui.exe), but I am noticing some eventviewer messages that make me feel that this is not a "Clean Shutdown"... On my Exchange server I get messages like "The MTA is running recovery on the internal message database because the MTA was not shut down cleanly", and all of them have messasges like "the previuos shutdown was unexpected.." Is this shutdown actually ok to do ? Is there a way to get a clean shutdown scheduled ...Thanks in advance for any input or advise..!!

It sounds to me like the shutgui command you are doing is forcing a reboot, and not cleanly letting NT shut down and then restart. If you continue to do it this way, eventually you will start having problems with your exchange server, maybe even a corrupted database (pain to recover from). I would recommend: 1) Dont' reboot weekly. I've had NT servers running Exchange operating for hundreds of days without requiring a reboot. Why reboot if there is no problem. You will actually LOSE performance because the caching that exchange and Nt have learned to increase performance is lost each reboot. 2) If you REALLY want to reboot the system at a specified time, find another utility to do it. But again, I don't see a need from my years of experience to reboot a server weekly.

You could always run a batch file before the reboot to stop all the services. The reboot will automatically re initialise the services at boot up (if they are are set to automatic) Lee

I use a shutdown.exe from nt4 support kit tools. It has an option to force programs to close and reboot.