KB148809 - PC NTMMTA: Mail Service Manager Monitor Flashes & Disappears

Article ID: 148809

Article Last Modified on 10/30/2006

Microsoft Mail Multitasking Message Transfer Agent 3.2a

This article was previously published under Q148809

SYMPTOMS

When you try to monitor a service from the Microsoft Mail Service Manager, the Monitor.exe command box will flash and disappear.

CAUSE

There are several reasons you will see the above behavior:

The External.ini file settings for the service are incorrect.
The service is already being monitored, either from this computer or remotely.
The service is not started.

RESOLUTION

To find out more specific information on why the monitor is failing, run Monitor.exe program from a command prompt.

Notes:

Monitor.exe is installed by default in the \Winnt35 directory.
You may see one or more the following errors:
Warning: Unable to find specified instance INI section.
Error: Service is already being monitored. (231)
Error: Service instance not found. Service may not be running. (2)

MORE INFORMATION

The following are the error messages and possible causes:

Warning: Unable to find specified instance INI section

The cause for this error is that the External.ini requires an Instance name.

For additional information on how to correct this, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
130396 Err Msg: Unable to Find Specified Instance INI.
Error: Service is already being monitored. (231)

You can only launch the monitor one time for each service instance. If you receive this error, check the Task Manager (double-click the desktop) and see if there are multiple listings for C:\Winnt35\monitor.exe.

If there are multiple listings, check each one to see if it is monitoring the instance you are trying to monitor. If not, then there may be a remote instance of monitor running for this specific instance.
Error: Service instance not found. Service may not be running. (2)

The Mail Multitasking MTA for Windows NT (NTMMTA) Service is initially run either during startup of Windows NT or after startup by going into Control Panel, Services and running the service.

If you try to monitor a service instance and receive this error, go into Control Panel, Services and ensure that the service is running. If the status states that is has been started, yet you still receive this error when run the monitor, you will want to stop the service and restart it.

If the service has been stopped previously from the monitor window, it will still show that it is started in Control Panel, Services until it has been stopped there also.

For additional information on this specific issue, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
131824 Press ESC and Y to Exit Monitor Window.
For additional information on Monitor.exe command line settings, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
134668 Monitor Option Can Be Called from a Command Line

Additional query words: 3.50 MTA

Keywords: KB148809