WLAN driver causes BSOD only on WPA network

I ran into something very strange today. I had a ThinkPad T41 that was getting intermittent blue screens of death. I ran hardware diagnostics, and they all came up with no problems. To make a long story short, I took it home and reformatted it. No more BSODs. Then I brought it back to my client's office, and I got a BSOD every time I booted up the computer - just after I logged in.

It seemed that whenever the wireless LAN card saw a WPA encrypted network (not even connecting to it - just seeing it), it would give this BSOD - about IRQ_less_or_equal (or something like that). I had to disable the WLAN card with the hardware switch (in this case Fn + F5). Then everything worked fine. In the end, I upgraded the driver for the Intel Pro 2100 3B driver (I think that was the model or something close to it). And after that, all was normal. Very strange.

Windows XP slow on Preparing Network Connections

I've seen this many times, but never gotten a solid resolution. A laptop takes a long time to process "preparing network connections" on bootup - before you even get to the login screen on XP. I troubleshot this today for a user who said it took 5 minutes to go through that when she was off-site. I timed it, and it was really only one minute and 47 seconds, but that's still an eternity.

Then I tested it when she was on-site. IT TOOK EVEN LONGER.

Then I went into Network Connections Advanced Settings (Network Connections -> Advanced -> Advanced Settings) and moved the IEEE 1394 connection below the LAN and WLAN connections. For some reason, it was at the top. Then on the next reboot, it was less than 20 seconds for preparing network connections.

upgrading Quickbooks file to 2008

I've done two upgrades to Quickbooks 2008 from 2006. Both times, the QB file was on the network. In order to upgrade the file - you have to install QB 2008 on a machine and open then file. When I opened the file when it was located on the network, it gave me an error about permissions each time. Then I had to restore the QB file from backup. In short, in order to upgrade the file - I had to bring the file down local and open it there and then copy it back up to the network.

Out of Office Assistant says "Command not available" when you try to acitvate or deactivate autoreply

I came across this issue for the first time two weeks ago when someone was setting an autoreply and again today when someone was deactivating an autoreply. When you go to Tools -> Out of Office Assistant, it tells you "Command not available."

To fix it, you go here for Outlook XP:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\O

utlook\Resiliency

or here for Outlook 2003:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\O

utlook\Resiliency

and rename the Resiliency key to Resiliency.old

Microsoft does not say why this is the case, but their KB article on this is here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/327353

Dealing with a corrupt local XP profile

If you find that a local profile is corrupt when trying to open it and it opens a temp profile, try this.

Log in as an administrator (not the user with the problem). Go to My Computer Properties -> Advanced -> User Profile Settings and copy the profile to some folder somewhere on the computer. Then delete the corrupt profile from c:\docs and settings (including the temp profile) and then re-log on as the user with the corrupt profile. Restart the computer. Log in as an administrator and copy the copied profile to the newly created profile in c:\docs and settings.

Adobe programs trials install fails with error 1327

I found a strange error when users were installing trials of Adobe Photoshop (or Acrobat) in Vista. They were getting "Error 1327 : Invalid drive H:"

As per the information here:
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.3bc28a5e?14

1. Right click on Command Prompt in the Start Menu and selected Run As Administrator.
2. Typed "Net Use h: \\servername\sharename"
3. Exit out of the command prompt

It's something ridiculous about the user's home folder on the server not having full administrative permissions which I guess it needs as a temporary folder.

Shutting down a computer remotely

shutdown \\computername /l /a /r /t:xx "msg" /y /c

\\computername: Use this switch to specify the remote computer to shut down. If you omit this parameter, the local computer name is used.

• /l (Note that this is a lowercase "L" character): Use this switch to shut down the local computer

• /a: Use this switch to quit a shutdown operation. You can do this only during the time-out period. If you use this switch, all other parameters are ignored.

• /r: Use this switch to restart the computer instead of fully shutting it down.

• /t:xx: Use this switch to specify the time (in seconds) after which the computer is shut down. The default is 20 seconds.

• "msg": Use this switch to specify a message during the shutdown process. The maximum number of characters that the message can contain is 127.

• /y: Use this switch to force a "yes" answer to all queries from the computer.

• /c: Use this switch quit all running programs. If you use this switch, Windows forces all programs that are running to quit. The option to save any data that may have changed is ignored. This can result in data loss in any programs for which data is not previously saved.

For example:

Shutdown /r /m \\server2