This is what they are all showing in the agents log.

Notice the modified dates, its pretty much consistent with the fact that the last date it was working was the 30th, then when i logged onto it with the remote administration agent diagnostic, more log files were generated.

and earlier in sept:

Would setting the "Symantec management Agent" Recovery option in services.msc help with this issue? 

More importantly, is it a good practice to set it to automatically restart on a failure?

You wouldn't have to restart the whole computer to get this working- just the Altiris Agent service. This could be accomplished using a windows scheduled task to kick off a batch file similar to this one:

sc stop AeXNSClient
sc Start AeXNSClient
 

I would suggest:

1) Applying the scheduled task / batch file work-around for on Critical machines
2) Try updating to the latest SMP Service pack and Update the SMP Agents (if possible, I know change controls can impede off the cuff upgrades)

3) If neither of the above work, you could try calling into support to get a thorough diagnosis of the problem by the Task Server team. They can check to see if there is an environmental issue or if this is a bug which needs to get to Development.

Let me know if you have any questions.

we have the same problem on some pc's.
They work fine, and al of a sudden the problem starts.

Also the pc sometimes hangs during shutdown/logoff with an error that the "Symantec management agent" is not responding.
this can take up to 40 minuts.

the logs al the same:

<event date="Nov 19 14:20:36" severity="2" hostName="PCDIG18624" source="Altiris Agent" module="aexnsagent.exe" process="aexnsagent.exe" pid="4780" thread="2296" tickCount="23841750"><![CDATA[Unexpected exit C0000005]]></event>

temporary sollution is to manually remove and reinstall the client.
i already updated al solutions to the latest available version.
the current agent version is 7.0.7436

so i think this can by seen as a know issue.

does anyone know another possible workaround/sollution?

Agent would run fine for a couple days then the service would hang and never return.  We worked with support and they provided an updated agent version Altiris Agent 7.0.8645.  That did not fix it either.  The last thing we have tried is disabling the Application Meting plug-in and that has at least seemed to resolved the agent crashes.  Problem is we need to use Application Metering.

Symantec why do you release such buggy software and provide such poor support on said buggy software.

some extra info.

from te moment the agent starts crashing during loggof/shutdown, it will happen every thime the computers logs off/shuts down.
so restarting the agent is nog a solution here.

i also hoped installing the new agent would do something, but the post from bondo left me dissapointed :-)

i really hope symantec would post their comment here, cause as you can see above, this is't a issolated problem anymore.

You mentioned that you had run the Solution upgrades, but did you enable the update tasks for all of the plug-in agents (in particular, App Metering)?  I had a Package Server which was unexpectedly crashing like this during the Agent start up, and traced it back to a corrupted snapshot.xml file which didn't have a filename listed on one of the rows!

Fire up Process Explorer or more simply FileMon, and turn up the Agent logging level to Verbose or Trace; it may help identify what is causing the failure.

You might also try looking through the client policy file to see if there is anything that seems out of place there (i.e. the "no file" snapshot.xml file I came across).

thx for the info!

the problem is I can't reproduce the problem and our users don't really like to wait 30 minutes before the pc shuts down. so mostly i just reinstall the agent.

So at the moment i don't have a pc to test it.
when one comes up, I'll trey to convert it to a VM and test on that machine.

I'll post an update whenever i'm done testing.

This is a "known issue" per the Symwise KB:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH143680

The current "fix" is to restart the Agent, so setting the Service Recovery options above would be an appropriate work-around for now.  We built a little script to push to machines for this:

 Option Explicit
Dim objShell
Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
' Run SC.EXE to set recovery options to 'Restart the Service'
objShell.Run "cmd /c sc failure AeXNSClient reset= 86400 actions= restart/5000/", 1, True
' Delete object
Set objShell = Nothing
WScript.Quit(Err.Number) 

We have this issue as well

It's holdng up at least two projects

Totally anxious here....