Month: February 2006

This morning at work, shortly after an AVG virus scan had completed, one of our users got an error when opening nearly any application that the dynamically linked library otdll.dlo could not be found in the path. After futzing with it for 15 minutes, I was at a loss and decided to reboot. The graceful shutdown failed miserably with errors and bluescreens, but the machine eventually rebooted on it's own. But lo and behold, after it had rebooted everything came back to life and was healthy as normal.

Now, this by itself isn't all that odd. Windows does lots of screwy things that can't apparently be recovered from without a reboot. What was odd is that nowhere online could I find a reference to "otdll.dlo" and the file was, of course, nowhere to be found on the system. A now-removed virus maybe? Who knows. Just thought this might be useful information to someone out there.

Today Microsoft came out with patches for 7 bugs. I promptly applied them as usual, and got the usual nag screen afterwards...

And of course, 10 minutes later, the same message. If you look up "restart now restart later" on Google, you'll get lots of frustrated people talking about bad design in software, and how this dialog is really annoying for many reasons. Some places tell you how to disable it with gpedit.msc, but I've got a simpler solution. Just run my regedit file: Restart Later (24 hour nag).reg. Once you run this (and reboot to apply the change) you won't be nagged again for 24 hours. If you really don't want to reboot yet, you can restart the Windows Update Auto Update Client process. Just hit Ctrl+Atl+Del, click Task Manager, go to the Processes tab, and look for the image name "wuauclt.exe". Select this and click "End Process". This will kill the program that keeps nagging you, and Windows will automatically restart it in a minute with the changes applied.

Just keep in mind, you really should reboot sometime today, you probably just don't have to right now... or in 10 minutes... or 20... 30...

About a year ago I had pretty time-consuming battle with spyware, and from the spyware, viruses. I don't know if the version of Symantec AV was out of date or what (the updates still kept coming in, but so did the infections). And AdAware just wasn't cutting it with the free edition. I'll admit it: I'm cheap. I don't like having to pay for software. Personally, I'd just use Linux + Firefox, or even settle for Windows + Firefox, but most people that I help are still attached to their IE because of web developer stupidity/laziness.

But I think I found a combination of software that seems to knock out infections for good, at least in 95% of the cases. Some users still manage to get some nasty stuff installed, but that tends to be pretty rare now. The first part is to uninstall all that other overpriced antivirus software. Get it all off of there. As far as I'm concerned, it's crap compared to AVG, so you might as well get rid of it. AVG is faster, simpler, and free (to residential users). I've even had AVG catch and clean up stuff that Symantec and TrendMicro either missed or couldn't seem to get rid of. AVG still has it's occasional struggle, but that can usually be remedied by running it's scan in safe mode once. My only suggestion is to turn off the annoying email signatures that "certify" your mail as being virus-free. It's seems rather odd to me that a company would do this generate a mental response of "I can trust this message: It's already been scanned!", especially when all a virus needs to do is emulate the same signature to gain that same sense of trust in the recipient. Besides that, it's just more cruft to parse through when reading an email thread.

So that pretty much takes care of all the viruses, and even some spyware, but we still haven't knocked out the majority of it. I'd say most infections nowdays end up being spyware-related anyhow. As I said, I had been using AdAware, but the free product is insufficient for ongoing spyware control. I also tried Spyware Doctor, but that kinda had similar results, and also was handicapped freeware. I'd been impressed with Spybot S&D, but was finding that the definitions were quickly getting outdated and the machines would eventually get infected again.


Really, I loved Spybot, but I needed something that automatically updated and re-immunized the system on a somewhat regular basis. I did some research and found a command line that seems to do the trick. I now run that everytime the user logs in. Ever since, those machines have stayed spyware-free. I put the command line into a registry file that you can put on your own system: Spybot Search and Destroy AutoUpdate / AutoImmunize. Just download and run the .reg file to update your current installation (I'd suggest Spybot S&D 1.4 or higher) to keep itself up-to-date.