Annoying IT support company

Okay, our Exchange server takes over an hour to boot, we've been trying to get this fixed for ages, and our external IT company keep coming up with more and more stupid ideas into why this would be.
They now say this could be because we installed .net v2 before v 1.1.
Everything I've heard about .net though leaves me to belive that it shouldn't make a monkeys bottom which is installed first.
What they say is that the Rootver registry value is 1.1.4322.0 and this could be causing the problems.
Anyone goy any opinions on this?

If they say it is a registry issue, and they seem to know the sequence that is required to fix the issue, why do you even know about this?

Have you ever seen the Royal Bank of Scotland adds?
A group of Bankers out on a Hike, and one starts sinking in Quicksand. The rest recognize the problem, and stand around determining the commities they need to make, the plans and proposals that need to be developed, etc...et al.. all the while the guy is still sinking? Until one of them just says THWIT! Throws the guy a rope, and pulls him out!

If they know the problem, if they know the solution to the issue, they should fix it! Why are they twiddling their thumbs, telling you what they think the problem is, and not doing jack!

:mad:

Ah because they want us to reinstall .net v1.1 then reinstall v2.0, but as this is a live server it has to be done out of hours, our IT support comapny do not work out of hours (well they do but they want big bucks for the privlage), so basically it means for each idea they have it means me working late, and waiting for over an hour for the server to reboot. This is about the 5th idea they have had, so hence my 5th evening sitting around waiting for a server to come back to life.

Once it's up and running is disk access done at normal speed? Sounds like the drive is stuck in PIO mode if it's slow after boot as well.

have you booted it to safe mode off hours?