So after nearly 8 months of battling this ongoing issue Microsoft has decided to speak up and acknowledge it. Today they published KB 948496 titled “An update to turn off default SNP features is available for Windows Server 2003-based and Small Business Server 2003-based computers” which addresses this very issue. I’m certain that the work of the Exchange team had a lot to do with the final recognition of this issue so much thanks to them!

To summarize, Microsoft has acknowledged that computers which have TOE capable network cards and have SP2 installed may face issues due to the Scalable Network Pack being enabled by default. This is due, primarily, to faulty drivers but as I stated in my previous blog entry even the most recent drivers direct from Broadcom do not address all of the issues. To address this problem they have released an update EXE which disables the Scalable Network Pack. Additionally, they provide methods to manually disable these features in the article.

While this is a major battle won in the war on this issue we cannot consider it complete won until Broadcom releases a driver that fully fixes the issue and Dell/HP/Etc. certify that driver for their customers.

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