PC SERVER GRINDS to VERY SLOW over a few (3-9) days of use.
When the sytem is rebooted, the system is PEPPY again.

let's start with this is NOT a virus/trojan or any of that
(updates are all applied, virus have been scanned for, behind company firewall)

this problem existed on clean installs
this is a problem on BOTH 32bit server 2003 and 64bit server 2003

we are using remote desktop to log into the server

PC 
MSI motherboard
two opteron cpus

the I/O OTHER BYTES for one or more instances of csrss.exe become INSANELY large.

I mean INSANE
on 32bit version, it would exceed 1,000,000,000,000 bytes (yes I mean one terabyte)
on the 64bit version, last night it exceed 900TB before I rebooted the server

after rebooting, system returned to normal, but the "symptom" recurs
it is about 200TB after 24 hours 
I am guessing that after ~2 days it will be SLOW again

1) what is going on?
2) what can be done to fix this?

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Request for Question Clarification by sublime1-ga on 26 Jan 2006 20:21 PST

joat...

If you look into Task Manager on the respective machines
when this is happening, can you see which processes are
so actively transferring data?

sublime1-ga

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Clarification of Question by joat-ga on 26 Jan 2006 21:10 PST

yes and no
this number increase even if "idle"
given that this is a server, 
there are many things, doing different things

I guess the clarification of the question is that I am looking for a
reference explaining different causes for this so that I can then
trouble shoot what is causing it.

it is unlikely that this problem is unique
but the "advise" to track down runaway processes is not an answer ...

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Request for Question Clarification by sublime1-ga on 26 Jan 2006 22:36 PST

You said:

"it is unlikely that this problem is unique but the "advise"
 to track down runaway processes is not an answer ..."

Quite correct. Your question is not "answered" until a
researcher posts in the Answer space. My remarks were
meant to serve as the beginning of a troubleshooting
dialog, and were based on the fact that my preliminary
research indicates that the problem is NOT unique, but
is typically associated with a single program or process
which is out of control.

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Clarification of Question by joat-ga on 26 Jan 2006 23:11 PST

SIGH
I wish it was SO easy ....
I have two servers, both using 2003 64bit

the first server has TONS of SAS programs running analysising TONS of data
multiple GB files and 10,000s of smaller files
after about a week it grinds to a halt ... (REAL REAL SLOW)
rebooting fixes this, but ........

the second runs my personal MS outlook and pretty much NOTHING else
(was a test platform)
I also use it to access the first machine via remote desktop control.

BOTH exhibit the same "problem" and symptoms.
The seocnd server takes longer to get to the "limit" and slow down ...
(it is currently at 500TB I/O BYTES OTHER and is still repsonsive)
(I am guess with whatever change were made in 64bit that the problem was moved out)
(but then the I/O counter is probalby just an indicator of something
else going WONKY)

Hi.

I don't know what type of data manipulation you are doing. This sounds
like csrss.exe backspace bug. Server 2003 sp1 evidently suffers the
same problem:

http://owasp.net/blogs/dinis_cruz/archive/2005/12/09/289.aspx

I hope this helps.