Daemon Crashes When Crawling Visio (VSD) Files

Recently, I ran down an issue with very frequent crashes occurring on one of my customers’ MOSS 2007 x64 Index servers.  Every time it would attempt to crawl virtually any VSD file in the farm, we would experience a crash in the daemon (mssdmn.exe) process.  These crashes made for some very long crawl times, so we had to figure out what was happening.

After some investigation and some great luck meeting someone quite helpful from the search team (thank you, Captain), we came to the conclusion our problem was due to an issue with the Visfilt.dll Visio IFilter itself.  Sure enough, we quickly tracked down a hotfix that contained the fix we needed to resolve this.  The details are explained in article 960502 and this problem only occurs on 64-bit architecture.  Once the fix is installed, you can verify you have the updated VisFilt.dll file by looking in the
“%CommonProgramFiles%\Microsoft Shared\Filters” directory.

What makes this interesting, however, is this is considered an Office Client Cumulative Update package, which means you would not get this fix as part of your normal MOSS patching procedure.

So, the moral of the story is, in addition to keeping current on the standard server side Cumulative Updates (CUs) for MOSS, you will want to also keep an eye out for the latest Office Client Cumulative Update packages which contain updated IFilters (such as the one above), and ensure those are installed on your Indexers in your MOSS farms as well.

Happy Patching!