FIX: BizTalk Fails Under Stress with HIPAA 1.0 and 2.0

If the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) parser is under heavy stress, BizTalk Server may report the following access violation in the event log, which forces the parser to quit:

This behavior occurs because the BizTalk HIPAA parser fails when a single-thread-only method is called from multiple threads, which results in invalid reference counting.

Service Pack Information

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Microsoft BizTalk Server 2002. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Hotfix Information

A supported hotfix is available from Microsoft. However, this hotfix is intended to correct only the problem that is described in this article. Apply this hotfix only to systems that are experiencing this specific problem. This hotfix might receive additional testing. Therefore, if you are not severely affected by this problem, we recommend that you wait for the next software update that contains this hotfix.

If the hotfix is available for download, there is a "Hotfix download available" section at the top of this Knowledge Base article. If this section does not appear, contact Microsoft Customer Service and Support to obtain the hotfix.

Note If additional issues occur or if any troubleshooting is required, you might have to create a separate service request. The usual support costs will apply to additional support questions and issues that do not qualify for this specific hotfix. For a complete list of Microsoft Customer Service and Support telephone numbers or to create a separate service request, visit the following Microsoft Web site: Note The "Hotfix download available" form displays the languages for which the hotfix is available. If you do not see your language, it is because a hotfix is not available for that language. The English version of this fix should have the following file attributes or later:

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in BizTalk Accelerator for HIPAA 1.0.
This problem was first corrected in Microsoft BizTalk Server 2002 Service Pack 1.

Steps to Reproduce the Problem

To reproduce the stress situation described in the "Symptoms" section of this article, follow these steps:

1. Set up the platform as follows: BizTalk 2002 and BizTalk Accelerator for HIPAA 1.0.
2. Set up a document specification, receive function, channel, and port so that an Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) file is picked up from a specific directory.
3. Create another port to send one or more files in the same pickup directory.
4. Drop a valid document instance into the pickup directory.

The output files are picked up again, and this creates an infinite pickup-drop loop.