Microsoft Systems Management Server SQL Monitor may stop responding on startup, and the SQL Monitor service (Smsdbmon.exe) may not continue to create notification files in the site server's Inboxes. This problem affects operations in Systems Management Server that depend on these notification files. Typical symptoms include the following:

• Packages are not copied to distribution points.
• Advertisements are not offered to Systems Management Server clients.
• Manual collection updates do not affect the collection membership.

Typically, if you right-click a collection in the Systems Management Server Administrator Console, click All Tasks, and then click Update Collection Membership, the SQL Monitor service creates a notification file that is named CollectionID.udc in the SmsRootFolder\Inboxes\Colleval.box folder. This notification file instructs Systems Management Server Collection Evaluator to re-evaluate the collection members.

However, if the SQL Monitor service does not create the notification file, the collection is not refreshed until the next collection update cycle. When this behavior occurs, you receive the following notice in the Smsdbmon.log file:

This problem occurs if the MSSQL Server service on the computer that is running Microsoft SQL Server is started through a low rights user account or through an account that does not have the correct permissions to connect to the Systems Management Server 2003 SQL Monitor named pipe. If the MSSQL Server service cannot connect to the named pipe, SQL Monitor is not informed of database changes and cannot create notification files for the various Systems Management Server threads.

To work around this problem, configure the MSSQLServer service to run through an administrator account or through the Local System account.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.

For additional information, click the following article numbers to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: