System folders for removed sites remain in the public folder hierarchy when you migrate from Exchange Server 5.5 to Exchange Server 2003 or to Exchange 2000 Server

Consider the following scenario. You migrate from Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 to Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server or to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. During the site consolidation process, you remove an administrative group. Or, you remove an Exchange site. In this scenario, the system folders for the sites or for the administrative groups that you removed remain in the public folder hierarchy. For example, the Offline Address Book folder or the Schedule Free Busy folder may remain in the public folder hierarchy.

When you use Exchange System Manager to try to remove these system folders, you experience the following symptoms:

• You are prompted for your credentials three times.
• You receive an "Access denied" error message.

This problem may occur if either of the following conditions is true:

• You removed the last Exchange Server 5.5 site from your organization.
• You removed other sites from your organization.

The folder that remains may be an orphaned system folder. You cannot use standard procedures to remove certain orphaned system folders. Typically, these folders do not cause any issues for the users or for the computer. Exchange Server removes orphaned folders over time.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.

When you move users across sites, make sure that you update the LegacyExchangeDN attributes to match the new site if you plan to remove the original site. We recommend that you add the original LegacyExchangeDN attributes to the proxyAddresses attribute as an x.500 address.