Just completed a migration from SBS 2003 to SBS 2011, but one of the legacy progams woudn’t port over so we needed to keep SBS 2003 running – at least temporary. SBS 2003 will start to reboot every hour after 7 days even though the server was demoted from the domain and DHCP and DNS services were turned off.
The solution was to turn off the SBCORE service and disable it using Windows Sysinternals.
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Here’s the steps (this is adapted from Jeremy’s Toolblox)
Download & Install Process Explorer
Use it to find SBCORE and pause that process
Now run regedt32.exe and change this registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SBCore
You won’t see anything underneath it. Right click on it, choose Permissions, and give “Administrators” group on the local machine full access. Be sure to select to replace permissions on child nodes.
Now if you press F5 to refresh, you’ll see all of the values and data under this key.
Select the “Start” DWORD and change it from 2 to 4. This will set the SBCORE service to a “Disabled” state.
Go back and check the services in Process Explorer. SBCORE should now show as Disabled and not running. It will not run even after the server has been restarted.
Now your SBS2003 Server will run without the popups and no reboots every hour.