Well, I've been having fun (not!) wih an incredible crashing Exchange 2003 server. It's cost me a fair bit of sleep through its insistence on shutting down the mailbox stores - and on one occasion leaving them in a Dirty Shutdown state where Recover didn't work - so it was time to Repair, which needless to say takes some time and doesn't necessarily give any guarantee of success. Luckily it worked.

The error messages are annoyingly unhelpful, and it doesn't appear that there's much help out there.  I've been ruling out possible culprits - such as backup and antivirus- and hopefully will be on top of it soon. It would be nice to be more certain though.

Thus endeth the complaining !