Question : Uninstalling DFS Service

I just took over a job that someone else started but never finished. They installed DFS on a domain with two servers  that were replicating one another. They really did not need to have DFS installed nor did they need two servers. But the two servers are not the problem.  The problem I think is the way the server was setup. These are brand new servers and the network runs very very slow. At times , it  can take the users up to  5 minutes to  accesss their documents that are stored  in a shared directory on  one of the servers.  Now to make things even more confusing, one of the supervisors of the company disconnected one of the servers from the domain because they were having so many problems with connectivity and the servers freezing on them. Unfortunately, the company that set this up, would not return their calls so they called me.    I know very little about DFS except for what I have read. I have never implemented it nor have I used it with any of my other clients. My question is , can I uninstall this service without causing any problems with their network shares. I have already turned off replication as the other server is no longer online. I can see in the eventvwr that DFS is still trying to contact  the other server and I am wondering if this is what is causing the network bottleneck.  What kind of problems can occur by turning off DFS Completely. Should I just rebuild the servers w/o DFS?  I just create regular shares?

Answer : Uninstalling DFS Service

in your scenario what i understand is that you used to have a DFS root name space and then under this DFS root you also have a link that is redirected to a shared folders on the two DFS servers that you used to have in order to maintain the replication between these two servers. turning off one of the servers after stoping the replication will not cause any problem to the shared files nor the shred path to the folders as long as the second server is still on and functioning but you have to make sure that all the replications are done between the two servers before stoping one of them cause some users files would not have replicated from one server to the other. also, if you have stopeed the replication between the servers correctly it should not contact each other for replication any more and replication could cause network congestion if the data replicated is pretty large.Moreover; taking off the dfs completly will not delete or erase any data the only problem is that you have to re-establish the connection for users with their data manually, you can also takes off the dfs and rebuild it from scratch as it was before crashes.