Strange characters when Pinging

Today I received a PC of a customer with a huge history of virus and spyware infections. It was impossible to connect the PC to a network.

I ran AVG Antivirus Free and AVG Antispyware Free to remove the remainders of the unwanted software, but still no network access. When I tried to ping my router and I got some strange characters in the output window.

As usual, Google served the answer and pointed to Microsoft Knowledgebase Article 817571. Method 1 restored the network functionality.

No files were found to look in. VS.NET 2005

All of a sudden the search in VS.NET 2005 stopped working with the message 'No files were found to look in. Find was stopped in progress.'.

I found a very bizar solution to solve this problem in VS.NET 2003, but pressing Control + Scroll Lock also did some magic in VS.NET 2005...

Msi.dll crashing my system

Today I lost some valuable time fixing my system. When Windows XP had started, I got a messagebox 'svchost.exe - Application Error' with the errormessage 'The instruction at "0x745f2780" referenced memory at "0x00000000". The memory could not be "read". Followed almost immediately by another error-window 'Generic Host Process for Win32 Services had encoutered a problem and needs to close.'
The details of the error report pointed to the culprit: msi.dll.

Fortunately, Google pointed me to the solution at http://swigartconsulting.blogs.com/tech_blender/2006/07/index.html

I will repeat the quick-fix here (just in case):
- Don't close the errormessages! (Doing so will hang your system)
- Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel
- Doubleclick on Automatic Updates
- Select Turn off Automatic Updates
- Click OK and reboot your computer
- Go to Windows Update and install the updates manually
- turn Automatic Updates back on

HP Deskjet 5150 on Vista

I had some big issues installing my HP Deskjet 5150 on Vista. On my portable running Vista Business, I could follow the instructions on http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00808478&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&product=304431&lang=en  to install an alternate driver.

On my desktop Windows Vista Home Premium was installed, but I needed remote desktop support (and RealVNC didn't work very well) so I upgraded to Vista Ultimate.

When trying to install my printer, HP (or Hewlett Packard) was not in the list of manufacturers! I contacted HP support and they told me something must have gone wrong during the upgrade process. I really didn't feel like formatting my PC and starting all over. My printer was working fine for pure text, but images and PDF's didn't print (except some dots and lines).

For days I tried to get my printer working. I even copied the drivers-folders from my portable to my desktop, but no gain.

Today I browsed the HP website to see if they supplied drivers for the newest printers, released after the final version of Windows Vista. And there I found a HP Basic Driver for all flavours of Windows Vista, you can download it from http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareDownloadIndex?os=2093&softwareitem=dj-46093-3&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&product=1827327&lang=en .

I installed the driver for the HP Photosmart D7300 series and now my Deskjet 5150 is working fine, although a little bit slower than with the appropriate drivers. But at least it prints again...

Undeletable message in Windows Mail

For a few days I had a message in my outbox that couldn't be deleted (it had been send correctly however).

In the preview window there was an error saying "Windows Mail encountered an unexpected problem while displaying this message. Check your computer for low memory or low disk space and try again."

Trying to delete the message resulted in "An unknown error has occurred." Since that message was stuck in my outbox, I was unable to send any more emails using the account used for that message.

I spend some time reading articles in microsoft.public.windows.vista.mail, but nothing helped.

So I decided to export all my messages and I closed Windows Mail. I renamed the WindowsMail.MSMessageStore file and I started Windows Mail again. It detected all my previous folders and restored all my mails and subfolders, the only thing I had to do was to move them out of the imported folder...