So starting on Friday afternoon I started noticing an inability to come out of screen saver when trying to log into my machine. As it turns out SearchIndexer.exe was pegging my machine (100% CPU of one core) trying to index something in my Outlook 2007 ost/pst.

To get around this I disabled the Windows Search service, but still couldn’t get Outlook 2007 to start up. Apparently Outlook 2007 starts up SearchIndexer.exe when starting up, which means i couldn’t get to my email.

It all came to a head today when I deleted the Search content index in an attempt to have it re-indexed, which of-course failed. Now it seems my system dies anytime I do any heavy disk access, like the kind you do when backing up files before a rebuild. Only option now is to plug the HDD in another machine, back  up the files and rebuild from scratch.

Sigh.

So I coded up a little MSMQ dumping utility the other day, in part to learn about MSMQ and in part to pick up some domain knowledge around one of the more fragile systems at work. And before you start laughing, yes I know it’s been over 3 years since I wrote a real app, but anyhow I gave it a crack.

Coded the utility up in about four hours, including time to acquire domain knowledge and MSMQ knowledge and ended up with this app:

Now this thing works perfectly on the staging machine, but refuses to return the Queue Count on the live server. Enter the MSMQ from the plumber’s mate blog. Full of lots of little handy hints on how to make MSMQ performance counters actually work.

Why can MSMQ installs get so broken, so often, that an MSMQ blogger can have so much material to talk about when fixing it? I don’t know if I should be happy I found a plentiful source for potential solutions, or worried about the many ways a seemingly simple operation can go wrong?