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One of the things I miss from using Linux on a daily basis is the ability to have my windows snap to the frame of other windows and the desktop itself. It helps to keep things organized and better utilize space.

I've found a tool that help you do this. allSnap. You should download it right now and check it out.

Did I mention I hate Microsoft. Hate is a strong word, I know. That's why I use it in this situation.

Today is the first day of my Memorial weekend vacation. I drove 6 hours to arrive at my destination at 3:00AM and went directly to bed. At 7:15, I get a call from work. "The Intranet isn't working". I'm tired. Really tired. But since I am the only IT guy at the company capable of troubleshooting such an outage, I have to get up. I have the caller look at the error in IE, but of course, all that comes up is the oh-so-useless "friendly" http error message.

"I'll take a look at it and give you a call back with an update". So I hop on the VPN and check out the Intranet page with Firefox (my default browser)...

Persits.AspUser.1 error '800a0020'
A device attached to the system is not functioning.

I log onto the Intranet server and quick look at the event log implies a disk block problem, but other than that, everything seems fine. On the face of it, you'd think the error means that some physical device on the computer has failed. However, a Google search says differently. The error implies that either a file is inaccessible or a file is corrupt, but it doesn't say what. Not even the IIS log file says anything usefull. So to attempt to get things running again, I re-install the Persits COM. No change. So I re-install Service Pack 4, thinking that some required file of IIS went corrupt due to the disk error. Nope. Still no change.

At 8:30 I get a call from work, this time someone can't log on to their own computer with his password or the domain admin user. WTF! Just what I need. Two serious problems at once. He really needs to get back on his machine, so I connect to the Active Directory master server via RDP. Guess what. I can't log in either. Something's f'ed up with the authentication server. So I tell him to reboot the server for me. Five minutes later, he's able to log in just fine.

Astoundingly, the intranet page starts working. I know now that the cause is the issue was that AspUser could not connect to the AD server, but WTF. That's one absolutely misleading and vauge error message.

Hate. Yes, that's the right word.

At work we use Symantec Ghost to keep time re-installing user computers to a minimum. Part of achieving that goal is trying to reduce the number of unique images we have to keep up to date. For instance, we currently have 2 images for 7 different models of computers. One image in particular is set up to work on both our Compaq laptops and older Compaq desktops. To make sure that this image works on both machines, we have to load the image to both and re-dump the image back to the Ghostcast server after allowing the normal hardware discovery.

The other day I noticed that the power profile on the desktop machine was set to Portable/Laptop by default. Quite annoying when most people step away from their desks for 20 minutes or more on a regular basis. Guess what! That's by design according to Micorsoft KB247234 . To resolve this, most people seem to be suggesting that you copy a profile that has been set to use the Desktop power scheme to the Default User profile. I find this particularly messy. It copies lots of other things like system paths along with it. Bad idea. And Microsoft's solution is just plain weak: Manually select the power scheme.

A better alternative to this is to load the Default User registry hive and change the applicable registry entry. To do this...

• Start --> Run.
• Open regedt32 [Click OK]. Note the lack of "i" in regedt32.
• Select the HKEY_USERS window.
• Go to Registry --> Load Hive.
• In C:\\\\Documents and Settings\\\\Default User , select and open the NTUSER.DAT file.
• Set a Key Name of "Default User".
• Under \\\\HKEY_USERS\\\\Default User\\\\Control Panel\\\\PowerCfg , open the key named CurrentPowerPolicy
• Set the string to 0 instead of 1. [Click OK]
• Select the HKEY_USERS\\\\Default User branch.
• Go to Registry --> Unload Hive.

Thats it! All new profiles created will use Desktop as the default profile.

Have you ever changed the logon password for your SQL service account and found that the service no longer starts up after a reboot on it's own? You look through the event log and you see the error:

The service did not start due to a logon failure.

OR


The MSSQLSERVER service failed to start due to the following error:
The account name is invalid or does not exist, or the password is invalid for the account name specified.

But when you go into Services, re-enter the login info, and restart the service, it comes up just fine. Reboot and the problem comes right back.

I've seen this issue and dealt with it for years now, since the release of 2K, probably. It's really annoying because you have to manually restart the service every time you reboot. And of course the change never sticks. Guess what. In true Microsoft fashion, they put the login info elsewhere in the OS, and in this case, it overrides the Services tab login info.

To get the login info to stick, you have to right-click on the server instance in Enterprise Manager, select Properties, enter the security tab, and re-enter the account password here. This setting apparently overwrites the Services setting upon each reboot.


Thank God I won't have to babysit that server any more. All I have to says is: FINALLY!

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.

Today I noticed that I could no longer print in Outlook 2003. It would keep coming up the with the error:

Line: 1343
Error: Unspecified Error

To resolve the problem, I had to run this:

Regsvr32.exe %Windir%System32Ole32.dll

If you run in to this, give that a shot and see if it fixes your issue. Props to Zaphood2003 for the solution.