Which summed up my Windows 7 PC.

The FAIL bit was that when I’d do a large USB file copy, without fail (no pun intended), I’d get a DRIVE IS NO LONGER RECOGNIZED error.

Then all my USB ports would fail to work.  To recover, meant rebooting my computer.

The problem got REALLY annoying.  I’d be copying podcasts to my MP3 player, and it’ll fail.  Or when I was trying to sync my Windows Mobile phone, and it’ll fail.

Microsoft released a patch late January, and since then I have been USB crash free.  You can read all about the patch here:
You encounter problems when you move data over USB from a Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2-based computer that has an NVIDIA USB EHCI chipset and at least 4GB of RAM

But not at these two machines at Melbourne Central Railway Station.  Nor at the next station on the line, Parliament Station.

Both broken.  The old Metcard machine you can see on the left was working just fine.

Machine 1 had the classic hang:

Machine 2 looked like it couldn’t find the network:

… to the virtual machine.  Check the values provided and try again.” error

It sucks as an error message.  Would it take too much programming effort to make it more meaningful Virtual PC team?

What does it mean?

It means you have a Virtual Hard Disk file larger than 127.5GB.  Which Virtual PC does not support.
You might have created this with the Microsoft Disk2VHD tool.
To confirm the “disk is too big” problem, open the Settings on an existing Virtual PC, and try to attach the drive:

In other words, we’ve captured a 160GB hard disk, and Virtual PC won’t let us use it.

But we can fix it, it’s a two step process

First we use DiskPart, and then we use VHD Resizer.

(more…)

Strangely enough, I see this error occasionally when I connect to our corporate Citrix server farm.  Googling for the answer, I found Microsoft’s answer, which was less than helpful.

As my (Citrix) server administrators are only two desks away, I asked

“What gives???”

Windows does that, the fix is to delete the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSLicensing registry entry.

You can either do that manually, or use the registry file I created here.

The problem was reported thus.

Internet Explorer is not storing session cookies for XYZ website.  The session cookies are stored when we use Firefox.

Two hours later, I can tell you that:

• I learnt more about web cookies than I will ever need to know again.
• Firefox does things differently to Internet Explorer.

Gentle reader, Session Cookies are cookies which only exist for the time which your web browser is open for.  They are deleted when you close your browser.  They are often used to cache your user name and password.

If you don’t have your username/password cached, you repeatedly get prompted for it.  Which is annoying.  Hence the need for session cookies.

So I started investigating the cookies not being stored issue..  The first thing I noticed was that Internet Explorer wasn’t even bothering to write the cookie down to the local hard disk.  So I broke out the network sniffer (Wireshark).  It didn’t tell me much, as all the web traffic was encrypted.

The next step was to load up Fiddler, the Web Debugging Proxy.  Fiddler allows you to inspect all the encrypted web traffic between your computer, and the rest of the world.  The session cookie that the XYZ website was trying to push down, had the following details:

There are two issues with this session cookie:

1. It sets an Expires date.
   This normally means that it is a Persistent Cookie, and not a Session Cookie.
   In other words, we should not see Expires in a session cookie.
2. The Expires date was set to a date/time in the past, which is not supported behaviour either.

So why does it work with Firefox then? – Firefox seems to be treating the expired Expires date as no date at all.  So it defaults to a Session Cookie.

Internet Explorer? – A bit more complicated:

Some further reading:
The Unofficial Cookie FAQ
Wikipedia HTTP Cookies

It was a Microsoft Word (VBA) application written back in 2001.

Essentially what it does is:

1. user selects a letter type.
2. the user then enters some customer reference numbers.
3. the VBA application does an Oracle database lookup to convert those customer reference numbers into names and postal addresses.
4. which the VBA then uses to “mail merge” into whatever number of letters need to be sent out.

And it was broken.

I had a feeling that writing about patch management policy would come back to bite me (and it did).

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SMS 2003 produces this error when you have decided to create a new Operating System Package.

The frustrating thing is that it may work on one PC, and not another.

The underlying cause?

Difference versions of OS Deployment Feature Pack were installed.  Version 2.50.3658.1102 caused the error I was having.

The fix to the "… invalid format." error, was to update to version 2.50.3726.2000.

The SMS Mirror driver is the root cause of the problem, with help from a dated video driver, the SMS Remote Control application (Wuser32.exe), and an unsupported operating system (Windows 2000).

So what does the SMS Mirror Driver do?:

Video acceleration significantly speeds up your Remote Control sessions clients.  For video acceleration on clients running Windows 2000 or later, SMS uses a Mirror driver.  The Mirror driver can simultaneously display the same output to several video devices and has no dependencies on the client’s video driver.
- Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 Operations Guide.

We received a fault report:

My desktop icons are grey colored.

It took some investigation, as the customer left out some details.  Here they are:

• the problem was occurring on a system they were remote controlling with the SMS Remote Control application.
• it was an intermittent problem.
• it was in a development environment.

(more…)

I had to change an email account password in CPanel, and I could not get my email client to connect to the mail server.
In the end, I proved that CPanel and my email client were much smarter than me.

This was what I did:

1. First went in the change password screen:
   
2. Hit the generate password button
   (more…)

It’s always the other guy, when something goes wrong.  Trim is a Electronic Document Repository Management program, beloved by large companies.  Records Management types seem to love it, but from an IT support perspective, it’s a dog of a program.  It was created by Tower Software, and was sold to HP in March 2008.

These are some of the Trim issues I’ve dealt with over the years:

Security update breaks Trim?
Tower Software answer:
“Microsoft will need to change their security patch.”

Can’t package Trim installation package to Microsoft standards
Tower Software answer:
“It’s acceptable to copy DLLs to the Windows System32 directory”

Minor version updates
Tower Software answer:
“We don’t use Microsoft Windows Installer MSP technology, you need to reinstall the whole Trim product.”

Not compatible with Office 2007, or the Office 2007 compatibility pack.
HP Support forum answers:
“There is a fix in the works, but because this is a limitation with ODMA itself, a Microsoft product, it is very difficult to resolve on our end.”

“Normally you will not have the 12.0 structure when only Office 2003 is installed.
But if the 12.0 structure DOES exist, we then assume that Office 2007 is installed and then check to see if the DefaultFormat key exists that I specified in my last post.”