Hi All, I have inherited a situation where an active Exchhange 2003 box and a now defunct Exchange 2000 box are in the same mail organisation. I want to get rid of the legacy Exchange 2000 references from ESM. All public folders, routing groups, RUS, OAB the whole 9 yards are correctly housed on the live production Exchange 2003 server. All that is left is an ESM reference to the Exchange 20000 server and its computer account in AD. The legacy Exchange 2000 server has been in a cupboard for the last 2 years and might function but I am hesitant to bring it back onto the production network (who knows what state its in!). So long story short , would the MS recommended ADSI removal and subsequent deletion of its computer account do the job for getting rid of this legacy 2000 server? I can't think of any gotchas, (it has been off for 2 years) but thought I would enquire first. MS recommend such servers are rebuilt and then removed gracefully, I really don't want to have to do this and I don't think this applies in my case. Any comments? Regards Pablo

Any hard deletion is not really "supported." The supported method has always been to restore the exchange server and do a clean uninstall. However, most of the times just whacking the server is fine as long as you have rehomed everything to the new server, I've never an into any issue. "If you cannot install or run Exchange System Manager, you can use the Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI) Edit snap-in to manually remove enough of the server attributes so that you can try a successful reinstallation. This method does not perform cleanups of references to the server object outside the server's own container. We do not recommend that you use this method unless you intend to immediately reinstall the server in the same administrative group. This is because you may have to manually remove or edit many attributes on objects throughout Active Directory." How to remove Exchange Server 2003 from your computer http://support.microsoft.com/kb/833396 James Chong MCITP | EA | EMA; MCSE | M+, S+ Security+, Project+, ITIL msexchangetips.blogspot.com

Hi, Please go-through the below link to remove the first Exchange 2000 Server computer from the site: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307917.Ravi | Messaging Specialist. This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.