OWSTimer caching assembly? SP 2010 dll issues

Question

I have a phantom / cached .dll that I cannot get rid of in my SP Farm. I'm making updates to Example.dll, which contains an Email Event Receiver that I made changes to. Redeploying to the GAC and restarting the app pool simply doesn't work. The old dll is still running despite my every effort track it down and replace it.

I understand the SP Timer holds a version of this in memory. So after hours of reading I have tried the following (On all servers in the farm):

IISRESET (through cmd and IIS manager) GAC deployment (through drag n drop and gacutil /f) Reset SPTimer (through Services.msc and Powershell) Forcing other unrelated timer jobs to run Using Process Explorer to kill all associated processes Clearing the SP Config cache Looking for C:\Windows\assembly\temp (doesn't exist)

Finally, Rebooting the Servers

The old code STILL RUNS!! What is going on? Where does this old assembly reside? I cannot redeploy the feature as my predecessor may be deleting lists on Feature Deactivation and it contains thousands of lines of code that would be much too risky. Help me please!

Answer 1

Do a search for the assembly on the local file system. It is possible that a copy of your assembly is in one of the BIN folders on the file system.

Answer 2

I had similar issues. In my experience, most often, these problems are associated with exceptions in the custom assembly of the solution. That's where you need to look for the problem.