Recently in Bugs Category

Well the upgrade seems borked somehow - the comment links are broken. I thought I would use the refresh template option to restore the templates back to the factory default (and then edit my changes back in again but when I try to use the Refresh Template option I get the message "Error creating new template: Template with the same name already exists in this blog."
Unfortunately it doesn't mention which template has the problem and I can't see any of the templates that it is trying to replace. A bit of troubleshooting guidance to mention which template would not have gone amiss in the software.
In the end I had to use the "Delete all templates" option, but it was able to backup the templates for me. Doing the refresh option did not work.

Thanks to the post from Danalive on the sql msdn forums by adding the characters ReportServer between the ReportServerVirtualDirectory tags in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.3\Reporting Services\ReportManager\RSWebApplication.config the error message of "The reportservervirtualdirectory element is missing" disappeared and I could access the Reporting Services homepage.
This weekend I had to rename the server as part of the GoLive procedure with this server. Sure enough, the rename of the server caused a lot more errors. There are a couple of pages on the MSDN site with instructions - Basic overview and instructions for renaming SQL2005 and Renaming a Report Server.
So far I've had several issues with this server - SQL2005 seems to have the buggiest and most unstable installation routine I've ever seen.

I downloaded the new Windows Live Installer program yesterday which provides the ability to install Messenger, writer, mail and photo gallery from one "easy to use integrated installer". There are two downsides to this - one is that the installer is really a stub that doesn't contain the full product - this is normally fairly annoying as it means that you can't download the full install copy for offline (or multiple) installs - instead you have to be connected to the network each time the software is installed.

The other downside is that in my case, the installation of Photo Gallery (the only piece of software that I actually wanted from this bundle as I already have the rest) doesn't work. Instead I get the error message "Install failed with error code 0x80240022" - a google search yesterday only came up with details for Windows Defender which didn't help me much.  Also, for those of you who are not aware, you need to hover the mouse over the error message in order for the full message to be displayed on screen in a tool tip. This means that there is no copy/paste functionality of the error message into google - instead you have to type it in manually. The link to "More about this error" only goes to a generic web page which tells you about the mouse tip.

The software also keeps checking the toolbar each time it is run - even though I don't want it to be installed but oddly enough doesn't check the Family Safety checkbox. It should be consistent to check both or leave both unchecked.

Finally found a solution/explanation to the Event ID 5050, Source IAS that reads "The description for Event ID ( 5050 ) in source ( IAS ) cannot be found. Apparently this is A LDAP connection with domain controller <domain controller name> for domain <domain name> is established. and therefore nothing to worry about. It's taken ages to track this down - I wasn't able to find it on eventid for quite a while, but this morning it was there.

I had a remote user, working behind a vpn connection to the office log onto the pc for the first time (which was a hard job in itself - I had to use the dial up networking login to authenticate to the domain and cache credentials to the workstation). This user was having problems running outlook with the software prompting him to provide the location for the office source files with the error message "Error 1706. Setup cannot find the required files. Check your connection to the network, or CD-ROM drive. For other potential solutions to this problem, see C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10\1033\Setup.hlp"
Entering the network installation location did not work. This issue is documented in KB Article 297834 which didn't help what so ever, the setup /fvm took forever to run but didn't work.
However, if I logged on as the administrator user outlook would run successfully. So I added the user to the administrators group and I still got the same error message.
Looking in the eventlog I got the generic error 1004, but I did get the message "Detection of product '{90110409-6000-11D3-8CFE-0150048383C9}', feature 'OutlookUserData', component '{8ADD2C9C-C8B7-11D1-9C67-0000F81F1B38}' failed. The resource 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Microsoft\ Office\ 11.0\ Outlook\ UserData' does not exist.
Copying the registry entries for the admin user for the Office\11.0 tree didn't work either.
A search on google for 11.0\Outlook\UserData came up with the article kb0106250 on rangersuite. I modified the text file to only include the version 11 entries, ran it and outlook ran through the first time wizard and the user (and I) was very happy.
For completeness sake, the registry entries to fix this problem are in the extended entry.

We had a customer who had a new installation of Sema4 (accounting and timesheets package) installed on a new pc and the performance of the software was abysmal in some cases. It was reported to me that if they opened the package and selected timesheets and then selected the employee drop down list, there would be a long wait for the dropdown box to appear and the program would appear to hang. I timed it and it took 7 minutes (for about 50 users) for the dropdown box to appear after it was clicked when the timesheet screen was first loaded.
The very strange solution is posted in the extended entry....

I've been puzzling over the missing pictures in internet explorer after the post two before this one had the picture missing. In internet explorer on the main page at absoblogginlutely.net you will get just an empty space where the google map picture is, but if you click on the space you will get taken to the larger image so it really is there.
If you click through to the monthly archive or individual entry the image shows up fine.
I know the problem is partly to do with the align="left" attribute on the image - if I remove this, then the image appears again properly. I know that this should really be styled with css, so I put the float="left" on the image and the image disappears again. If you add the "position=relative" to the css then the image appears again and the text wraps around correctly but if the page is wide the graphic overflows out of the background image and spoils the effect.

There are several posts on the internet that I've found describing my problem but I couldn't find a solution.1 2 3

The following posts were made from a sample posting to demonstrate the problem (I chose a garish yellow background to make it easier to see where everything is). As all these screenshots are hosted on zooomr and I've used the blog picture functionality, which includes styling on each picture posting, these images look ok in this posting but the styling is a pain to type in for each picture and not exactly easy to remember either.
The original posting with an empty picture.

The same posting viewed in firefox - looks great

and in firefox again, extra wide - the image stays within the background box.

Remove the float left and the picture appears in internet explorer

But if I set float=left within css the image disappears again.
Add position="relative" and the image reappears again and looks great

Until I change the width of the browser and then the image bleeds outside of the box.

If you've ever tried to create a footnote in Word and got the daft error message that states "Start At must be between 1 and 16383 for this format." when the Start At is set to 1 (or 2 or 3 or 4 or ...) then the fix is to select the entire document apart from the last paragraph mark (turn the viewing of paragraph marks on by pushing the ¶ button on the toolbar) and then copy paste the document into a new document. Hopefully the document is not that big and that you can copy paste with no problems! Thanks to this post on google groups for the answer

kb article 909444 has how to fix the issues that may arise when you install Microsoft Security Bulletin MS05-051: Vulnerabilities in MSDTC and COM+ Could Allow Remote Code Execution (902400). Although I've not had any of these issues - yet - this will be good reference for me.

I'm getting the message "library not registered" when attempting to open a navigator in quickbooks with errors on the various qpg files that it tries to open. On speaking to their tech support who had me remove the software, install it, install in safe mode, remove, reinstall in normal mode, then download the updates again (thankfully I had saved the 80mb patch file to disk so I didn't have to download it again) he then recommended that I repair Internet Explorer as this was the problem. Unfortunately you can't repair IE in xpsp2 (see KB318378 so I reinstalled xpsp2 again.
At this point, he admitted, several times, that NOONE in support can tell me what ocx's or dll's are required by the various pages used in the Navigator pages. I asked who could tell me which files are needed, but he kept telling me to repair internet explorer instead.
I've heard Intuit's support is notoriously bad and I now believe it. I would have expected him to check my internet explorer security settings, popupblocker settings and it was only after about 40 minutes on the phone that he checked what version of quickbooks I was using (pressing F2 gives that information)
He was not interested in the fact that there was an incompatibility issue with Quickbooks Premier 2002 and Windows NT and that I am getting the same type of message. Unfortunately in this case, the pc that has a working copy of quickbooks and the faulty pc have the same version of comcat.dll
From the sounds of it, there is a permission problem in the registry under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib\ but whereabouts I am not sure. It's time to use regmon from sysinternals again to monitor for access denied messages when launching quickbook navigators.
Solution in the extended entry

On some new machines that I've been building I've had major issues with SYSTEM dsn's not working properly and getting the "DSNNAMEis not an existing data source name" when trying to configure a dsn.... Eventually I found an answer.....

It turns out that if Windows XPSP2 is not compatible with cstext32.ocx and cscmd32.ocx (bundled with Great Plains software and others) and that you will often get a message saying that cstext32.ocx and cscmd32.ocx could not be registered quoting an error number 0x80040200. The official solution is to obtain a patch from the vendor and some vendors, such as hy-tek are more forthcoming than others.
I doubt it will be long before I start to get hits from Google on this as there are not a lot of solution pages out ther but a lot of problem pages!

KB article 896358 shows the steps on re-enabling this ability on intranet/lan locations.

I've reinstalled greasemonkey following the Greaseblog: Mandatory Greasemonkey Update by installing version 0.3.5 from greasemonkey.mozdev.org

Firefox 1.0.6 is now out to fix the problem with broken extensions. Unfortunately it breaks roboform's extension even more as they added version checking into their latest patch so it can't be used in 1.0.6. I'm still having problems with this extension - I thought I had narrowed the problem down to a mailto link in a form but it also crashed on me this morning when adding some more urls to the MT blacklist. It didn't like me selecting some text with the mouse, but when I repeated the action after it had relaunched it was ok.

MS Antispyware decided that logmein was spyware last night due to the possibility of it being used for remote control from afar. I've had this software installed on the computer for several months and this is the first time that it has been detected. Naturally I've flagged it as "ignore always"

If you use roboform with firefox 1.0.5 you may find it crashes about 3 seconds after a web page is loaded. I've therefore gone back to 1.0.4 whilst I do some more digging. I've sent the reports off to roboform and microsoft, can't do the mozilla ones as the talkback agent still doesn't work.
Update I reinstalled 1.0.4 and then installed the roboform extension (I was previously using the .exe file addin. Then upgraded to 1.0.5 and boom - the browser crashed after a couple of secs. THEN the whole computer blue screened...this was not good. After a reboot I uninstalleded the roboform extension and everything is hunkydory again. Hope they fix this quick as I've come to rely on this extension.

I can now upload images in firefox again. (see this post for when it failed).
I ran firefox in safe mode using firefox -safe-mode and I was able to upload an image to flickr ok. This meant that the problem was a conflicting/corrupt/flakey extension. I went through my list of extensions and deleted some that were duplicate in other extensions and tidied up the ones I no longer needed. I removed informeter, livelines,tab clicking options, undoclosetab, sitebar and evernote extensions and the problem went away. I reinstalled sitebar and evernote (as I use these) and the browser doesn't crash.

Grrr - firefox crashes after I've uploaded a file to a website. Happens on geocaching.com, this blog and on Microsoft's site uploading a bug report. Very annoying as the whole browser crashes :-( Not sure what has caused this, probably some faulty extension or something. (It happens when the page you get after uploading a file is displayed). I've sent several reports back to Microsoft and the mozilla group, but the latter is annoying as most of the time the bug reporting application seems to freeze too :-(

I've never had my display driver blue screen and not respond, but this morning it happened for the first time. Using Google Earth I was exploring Australia when all of a sudden the mouse and keyboard stopped working and the computer beeped. About 20 seconds later I got a fault in the display and it went back to a 640*480, 16 colours resolution, told me to reboot and then send the error report to Microsoft. Immediately after sending the error report I get sent to their analysis page which tells me that a Microsoft analyst has investigated this problem and they don't have a solution and that I should contact Intel for a solution.....hmmmmm I wonder how much of that is true. Apparently you can track this problem and get notified when/if they update a solution - apart from the fact that the wizard fails saying the page can't be found.

After I rebooted the pc this afternoon I got an error with svchost.exe. On reporting it to microsoft with a click of the button I got a message "The error "Generic Host Process for Win32 Services Error" occurs after you start or restart your computer.
The error appears in computers with Windows XP Service Pack 2 and security update 873333 (MS05-012) installed. We do not expect this experience to harm your data or the performance of your computer."
Oops! FIX: Generic Host Process for Win32 Services Error

Apparently if you use FAT32 on your system partition and use the GUI interface to schedule cronjobs in NT4 or Windows2000, the scheduled jobs will fail to run after the time change back to Daylight Savings Time as the permissions get corrupted. Guess how I worked that one out! (and no it's not my preference to use the GUI or have fat32 c: drives.)

I downloaded the SANS institute gdi scanner this morning and scanned my local pc. Apart from the old files in uninstall directories (for service packs etc) there was one vulnerable file in sonic's MYDVD software. I've submitted a support request so it will be interesting to see what response they get.

Sorry Danny, you will definately need to skip this post! One of the PC's in the office is taking 5 minutes to boot up - this is a fairly new pc and shouldn't take *that* long to boot. Quick look in eventlog gave me the error "WMI ADAP was unable to process the performance library due to a time violation in the function". Entering this into Event ID gave me the solution to run winmgmt /clearadap which drops back to a chevron point but reduced login time by 50%. Now to work out what is causing the rest of it (Intel Pro network service seems the next culprit)

Had a weird call this morning. The customer rang to complain that everytime they accessed the menu in our telnet application, sbclient, the menu would immediately disappear again. After doing a bit of digging it was discovered that the culprit is the logitech mouse and keyboard. Using a normal mouse/keyboard combination doesn't have a problem.

I was trying to extract a file from a 141MB tar.gz file (from my webspace backup) and got this dialog box showing me the process. I've also submitted this to This is broken

Anyone have any ideas on how to change the application that is launched when the pointer is something like file://c:\temp\fred.html ? One of the desktops at work has Firebird installed as their browser and when we use teamcalendar in outlook, the web page opens in Firebird (which won't work due to ocx problems). I need to open it in Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer HAS been set as the default web browser, and http:// web pages come up in ie ok. file ones insist on launching in firebird. the file types option in Explorer doesn't seem to handle the file:// option so I can't work out what I need to change.

Tried to migrate data using the File And Settings Transfer Wizard (FAST) on 98 machine but the software kept failing when it came to import the data saying that it could not find the required data necessary. After running Windows Update on the machine (which had *loads* of updates necessary) the same settings worked ok after a new wizard disk was created and run on the machine. Apparently one of the patches to XP solves certain bugs and issues including FAST ones.

The home computer has now been basically scrapped. A new motherboard, which means new cpu, ram,heatsink and fan have now been ordered. On the plus side I should have a pc that will (on paper) be twice as fast. On the downside I have a dent in the wallet - not really want I wanted. I've also suffered really slow internet this weekend and this afternoon its been almost impossible to connect, with connections on adsl lasting a minute if I've been lucky. I replaced the netgear router with my original conexant one and i'm back to normal. I really hope that the router is not fried too (although that should be under warrenty)

The OS was wiped on the crashing pc after a ghost backup of all the drives (27gb worth!) and XP was installed on the freshly formatted disk. For about 5 minutes it looked like everything was working again, until we went to copy a file across the network and boom - a reboot. Aha! Network card we thought (again), and tried to copy the file again when the machine was back online......swine thing worked this time, and the next two times........until we clicked on the start button - KABOOM! At this point I almost cried but it was time to leave my patient co-techie to have his lunch and go do the hoovering of our lounge carpet....to be continued :-(

I think its time for a new motherboard and bits for the main pc. I can't even get the stupid thing to boot off a w2k or XP cd. As soon as it switches the screen after the "Press F6 if you have loads of money and own a scsi card" the thing reboots....I'm beginning to wonder if the graphic card is stuffed......

Remember when I posted about my main pc rebooting? Well it's still happening. It also happened today (consistently) when I took it round PCJunky's house. This ruled out the usb devices, mouse, keyboard, psu cable (incidentally I had to replace the PSU as it didn't survive being switched off whilst we were on holiday strangely enough), monitor and sound cables. The system will now consistently reboot (as if I had pressed the reset button) in one of three random places. Either immediately the first w2k loading screen finishes - where the bars go across the screen normally the screen will then clear and the windows backdrop appears, after the pc has (automatically) logged on or when everything in the startup group has finished loading and about 10 seconds of doing nothing. 3 places for it to reboot and then the machine will behave for a while......
We did find out that if the machine is booted without the network card plugged in, on the second and subsequent boot the machine runs stable. Also if I boot to an alternative OS/CD then the system is also stable. I'm going to use the msconfig tool later tonight/this weekend to see if a clean build has the same symptoms.
What is annoying is that there are no bsod or log files generated so I've nothing to debug and of course all these reboots dont do the data on the disk much good!

Trying to install the .net framework 1.1 setup program so I can then install intravnews on the laptop. However when I try to run the program I get the error message "Error 1325.'andrew.helsby' is not a valid short file name." The filename referred to is my username on the computer. A search in google does not help as there are lots of similar problems but no definite answer on how to fix it. Ironically the solution in technet is that its a fault in the msi file and that a patch should be installed on the pc of the producer of the msi file!
Update By logging on as another user on the computer I was able to install the patch. The weird thing is that the other user also doesn't fit the 8.3 username format either.

Had a reply from the makers of DigiAny to my question about the directory structures which was a lot quicker than I expected as I sent the email to them yesterday so well done Will! I've asked them about the registration number problem.....I've also discovered that passwords get truncated to 10 characters.

I logged a call with Pipex on Sunday @ 7.30pm and had a response back saying they couldn't find a problem on Monday @ 3.20pm. Sure enough the problem had gone away by then. Annoyingly they asked for a traceroute which I should have given them in the first place but forgot - doh! The support from Pipex has definately improved from that experience!

Not sure whats going on, but for a few days I've found certain sites such as yahoo,google, blog.iloaf.com, ggsearch.blogspot.com and others not working. Pages just don't load for some weird reason. Initially I put it down to the sites being hosted in america somewhere affected by the power cuts. However in ggsearch's case I can lookup the ip address in dns, and then take the server ip address into a web page and get the main servers webpage ok. Yahoo seems to be behaving at the moment but there is no response from google, although i did eventually get the favicon.ico loaded but no page. The two sites that I need for banking over the net, Halifax Online and Royal Bank Of Scotland are also unavailable, although both these sites stop on a traceroute when the network gets to bt.net (quel suprise!)
Can anyone else get to blog.iloaf.com or ggsearch.blogspot.com

From the Windows and .net magazine is an article providing details about the recent Win2K SP4 Bluescreen Fix; Terminal Server Bug Fix; and Citrix Logon Delay

For the past couple of days, every time I've loaded up Firebird I've been getting the error "Java Plug-in for Netscape Navigator should not be used in Microsoft Internet Explorer. Please use Java Plug-in for Microsoft Internet Explorer instead". Realised today it was because I had downloaded the User Agent Switcher and I had left it in the Internet Explorer Settings. Set it back to the default (Mozilla) settings and everything worked great again.

I attended the Windows 2003 (subsidised) Hands-On Labs this afternoon. Non Techies may not want to bother reading the rest of this.
Overall I think it was a bit of a waste of time, but there were some interesting things. Each delegate had one pc to use, but through the use of vmware each machine was running XP on the desktop, and then two virtual servers in a vmware window. This enabled us to test the upgrade of a domain to a 2003 infrastructure and not a lot else. The rest of it could have been done with just one 2003 server. Things to note are below:-
Complex passwords are now turned on by default, no more password or password1 for passwords. Now you'd have to use P4ssw0rd.
When you shut the server down, it now asks why you are shutting down. Any information that you enter into the dialog box gets entered into the eventlog so you can trawl through and find out the reasons for all those the occasional reboots.
Allegedly there is better support for unix integration although this wasn't noted in the lab.
IIS6 has been improved and is apparently more robust. Personally i've not seen any problems with IIS5, although I've only hosted a couple of sites on each server as opposed to hundreds of sites. It's now possible to instantly enable or disable various plugins to the server, such as .net services, asp pages or whatever.
Active Directory has been improved - you now now drag and drop users from Organisation Units to another one - not a big deal in my book! More interesting was the fact that you can now change attributes on multiple AD entities in one go, ie you can set the logon hours for multiple users all at once. This was meant to be a big feature, but its actually putting back functionality that was available in UserManager when you could do this! (Ironically they asked what we'd rather use - AD Users and Computers or UserManager - my answer would have been the command prompt and resource kit utilities and batch files! or Windows Scripting Host can do this, but its too complicated and not very well documented just how to use wsh).
They made a big fuss of Volume Shadow Copy - the service that I was led to believe allowed you to roll back to previous versions of documents, so that if you deleted or corrupted a word file, then you just rolled back to the previous one. The advantage is that the user can do it, so less interruptions for the IT staff, but the stupid thing is that it's done on a time/scheduled basis. In other words the administrator schedules when a snapshot of the drive (its done on a drive by drive basis) is taken and you can only roll back to these occurances. So its NOT a roll back of versions, more a "instant/userbased restore to a fixed point in time". I think this could have been drastically improved.
Terminal Services is more integrated - its now automatically installed and there is no remote admin/application mode. The ability to only allow one session per user is now an option, although when the second instance attempts to log on, strangely the server kicks off the original user with no intervention and automatically logs the second instance in. This seems REALLY bizarre to me and could cause real headaches when people are in the middle of a word document and they get kicked out! Mind you, its a great incentive to stop people sharing their passwords around the office!
Another feature was billed as a remote control MMC, which seemed to be badly mis-represented. It's not Terminal Services as normal, instead you get remote control of the CONSOLE of the server. This means that you would see the output of AT commands etc. If someone is currently logged on at the console, the console screen gets locked, and you end up with the same desktop - it acts as a software version of a dual monitor switchbox.
Apparently improved clustering is available, with up to 8 nodes on the standard Advanced Server, but seeing as though i've not used clustering then I can't comment apart from that.
DFS is now built in, instead of being an optional addon.
XP now has User State Migration, if you've bought a new machine, this utility (which you can save on a floppy or use over a network/parallel cable) apparently makes a snapshot of your system settings and migrates them across to the new laptop. I didn't get the impression that this works very well and I've recently purchased some other software, BackRex Backup Expert that does this job - and does it well.
Folder redirection is improved in Group Policy and can now be switched on and configured per User Group - no longer OU dependant.
The instructor was fairly good, although wasn't aware that 2003 was actually available for purchase - pretty scary for a promotional training course, although this seems to be a classic case of IT Trainers not having any real world life/experience and therefore not knowing what is actually going on in the real world!
The major downside was that we didn't get any freebies, not even a demonstration copy of Windows2003 so I can't even play around with it at home (especially as we don't get demo software with our technet subscription). So far I've not seen any incentives to upgrade to 2003, for a brand new network installation I would definately put in 2003, (as long as it was not being used for a non-MS application server). I think you really need XP on the desktop for full benefits and also a complete 2003 server farm..... I don't really see any point in upgrading a w2k server to 2003 though. Microsoft's marketing/technical/promotions department needs to work a lot better to get a half decent proper roadshow lab out there. The labs were free (actually they cost £49 but MS pay the training centre) and I would have been very annoyed if I'd paid for the half day.

Spent about an hour trying to work out how to get MoveableType installed on my latest host, absoblogginlutely.net. Finally got it working. The problem was that ftp was showing the path as /public_html when infact I needed /home/usernam/public_html. As soon as I figured that out, I was off......