Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this. --  - Bertrand Russell Vista's DEP (Data Execution Prevention) is designed to prevent unauthorized or dangerous code from executing on your system. However, sometimes legitimate programs such as Windows Media Player or even Windows Explorer may trigger DEP actions, whether legitimate or not. One example is when you have files in the Recycle Bin and you attempt to open Recycle Bin and choose "Empty the Recycle Bin". Data Execution Prevention jumps up with that ugly "Windows Explorer has stopped working" dialog.      Here's a fix that works for me: Open Control Panel, and go to  "SYSTEM". On the left side click "Advanced system settings".  Click the "Advanced" tab and under Performance, click Settings.  Now click on the "Data Execution Prevention" tab. Check the "Turn on DEP for all programs...

Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.    -- Friedrich von Schiller I don't know about you, but in our " Things I hate most about Windows Vista " poll, one of the most frequently ticked topics was "Folders that refuse to remember the view settings you've set".  If you set a Details View with "All Items" on a folder and then drop a couple of jpegs in there, Vista tries to "help you" by changing the view. Well, I don't WANT Vista to help me! I don't want Documents, I don't want Pictures and Videos, and I don't like Green Eggs and Ham! (In the forums they are calling it "VisDUH"). Here's a fix from the TechNet forums , converted into a batch file:   setlocal set BASE_KEY=HKCU\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell :: Delete cached folder views reg delete "%BASE_KEY%\Bags" /f reg delete "%BASE_KEY%\BagMRU" /f :: Set default folder template reg add...

The gods too are fond of a joke. - Aristotle Recently I upgraded XP Pro to Windows Vista Ultimate. It wasn't until sometime later that I found I had lost my DVD drive. The driver appeared in Device Manager but it had that familiar yellow exclamation mark indicating a problem loading the driver. After a bit of searching, I discovered that the culprit was Roxio CD/DVD software (e.g., "DLACDBHM.SYS" et. al.) which is not Vista - compatible, and thus blocks correct loading of the built in Vista CD/DVD drivers. The FIX: First step, in C:\Windows\System32 you need to find the DLA folder and delete it. That's their "Stuff". If you want to get sophisticated, you can search the registry for all keys that point to any of these .sys drivers and remove the entries. Next, run this Registry Fix script courtesy of Doug Knox: 'Restore CD-Roms and DVD's to Explorer 'xp_cd_dvd_fix.vbs '© Doug Knox - rev 04/14/2002 'Downloaded from www.dougknox.com 'ba...

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it. -- George Orwell I'm posting this fix because it is extremely difficult to find on the web. In certain situations, the underlying COM dll's or type libraries that "help" the Visual Studio IDE perform its various functions get unregistered, causing any number of different symptoms. This can happen for example if you've installed an Orcas Beta (which does it's own set of "stuff"), then uninstalled or done a repair or upgrade on Visual Studio 2005 on the same machine. Most of these COM Server "helper" dlls and tlbs can be found here: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE You need to re-register those of these that are COM Servers. Of course, you cannot know which are and which are not, but running REGSVR32.EXE on all of them cannot hurt anything. What I did to make this easy is first to create a list of all of them. You can do this from a DOS window with the command: dir /b *.dl...

"No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." -- Nietzsche And so continues my never-ending love/hate saga with Windows Vista: You try to open Internet options From the IE Tools menu, or from the Control Panel Internet Options applet. In IE, you get a dialog box "this operation has been canceled due to restrictions ...". In Control Panel, it just silently fails. Yeesh, methinks - more Vista BS! Well this just cropped up on my Vista box (or at least I just noticed it). So after not directly finding anything with a few well-placed searches (which right there indicates it's probably a fairly new issue), I decided to start undoing some of Microsoft's little "hotfixes". The latest crop were all installed on June 13, 2007 and the ones I removed include these KB numbers: 929123 931213 933566 905866 936825 I'm sorry I cannot be more specific, but I'm not gonna reboot after every single one. I uninstall four to six at a time a...

Lots of people (me included) have been complaining that Flash (such as for viewing videos on Youtube.com) doesn't work. You go and install Flash again (as prompted) and when you go back to view the video it's like you haven't done anything -- no Flash. Here's the fix: Navigate to C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\Flash Then right-click over both 'Flash9b.ocx' and 'FlashUtil9b.exe', and choose Properties. In Properties choose the "Security" tab. Click on the "Everyone" account (or add it if it isn't there), and the button called "Edit" and then check the box called "Full Control", click "Apply" and do the same with your own Windows local account name. Once you have done this for both files, run the FlashUtil9b.exe and it should install and update and tell you to restart. Do so and you should now find that YouTube and other sites that use Flash now work.