I had posted a blog about what happens if you do have Lingering Links in your environment about a year ago. The blog here appeared on the Exchange Blog Site. Now that I have my own blog site up and running, I just wanted to make reference to the article as in the field, I still find customers with Lingering Links in their Active Directory Environments, which impact Exchange Organizations.
The OABValidate.exe toolset keeps getting better. It can now find broken conical name references in your AD environment. For example; remember when Instant Messaging was in Exchange? Exchange 2000 that is. I ran into a company that had deployed that feature. We found 1500 users (out of 3000) that had broken references to the since decommissioned servers. Were they causing a problem? Not necessarily, but something that was no longer needed to be referenced and therefore could be cleaned up to ensure there would be no issues with the users accounts.
You may have noticed on the blog post that Nino Bilic posted the article. That is because he is one of the current owners of the eHelo site. My name is at the bottom, he just forgot to post it as the ‘Exchange Team’.
So just make sure you have a nice clean AD with no Lingering Links, run OABvalidate.exe, it runs pretty quick depending on your AD environment, and maintaining a healthy environment is always a good idea to keep Exchange running happily.