Steven Van de Craen's Blog

Problem

I was receiving multiple complaints from clients with the above errors in the machine's Event Log:

Unhandled Exception: System.AccessViolationException: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.

Besides the errors it was no longer possible to manage the Web Sites using IIS Manager which gave "The path specified cannot be used at this time."

Approach

Searching on the Web had led me to believe this would all be fixed when SharePoint 2007 Service Pack 1 released, so I upgraded all (problematic and non problematic) servers to

• .NET 2.0 SP1
• .NET 3.0 SP1
• WSS 3.0 SP1
• MOSS 2007 SP1

The problems remained however...

I found out that an iisreset would solve the issue but this really wasn't feasible to do every day.

Next I found that just restarting the Windows SharePoint Services Timer Service (SPTimerV3) also did the trick and was less intrusive:

Other suggested solutions include:

• recreating the SSP
• reset the service account credentials
• Timer Job Shocker

But none of the above solutions seem to be the definite answer.

Solution

Microsoft recently released the following KB with hotfix:

References

http://blogs.neudesic.com/blogs/grant_earl/archive/2007/04/05/5465.aspx

http://glorix.blogspot.com/2007/09/attempted-to-read-or-write-protected.html

http://forums.asp.net/t/675515.aspx

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/fromthefield/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=47