I ran across a problem recently whereby when a user would double click an excel file, Excel would open but wouldn’t display the file until Excel was minimized and maximized again. The machine had a fresh installation of Windows XP on it, and had all of the updates available from Windows Update. The files would open fine from the File > Open menu.
The solution came about from looking at the XLS and XLSX filetypes. I noted one main difference on several machines that didn’t have the error compared to the one that did. See below on how to fix it: Read more…
Ran across an interesting problem the other day – a dos-based application would not start. As soon as it was launched, an error c0h in NTVDM was thrown. The application was run from a share and was not an installed program. Other machines were able to use the application without any problems.
Other 16 bit applications also had issues: CMD would run fine, but COMMAND would not. This led me in the direction of something patching the 16 bit subsystem of Windows XP. I checked the AUTOEXEC.NT and CONFIG.NT files which were both as expected. I then checked the system32 directory and found numerous malicious files.
Read more…
Sometimes when you uninstall a program that handles Zip files you find that it doesn’t restore the original Windows zip folder functionality. You can use the following in a command prompt to re-enable it!
regsvr32 %windir%\system32\zipfldr.dll
You may need to restart windows for this to take effect.
There have been far too many times when I’ve come to a Windows XP Workstation that doesn’t have numlock enabled at boot.
How to resolve? A nice “Quick” fix is to update the registry. Create a .reg file using the info below and import it in to the registry
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Keyboard]
“InitialKeyboardIndicators”=”2″
Or just navigate to the relevant subkey in the registry and modify it. If you look on: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc978657.aspx you can see that they specify it for the current user and it is supposed to get stored on a per-user basis. The above just helps to set it as the default for the initial boot sequence.
A new year and a new start to the tidbits of information that I like to collate, discover, and reiterate to those who are interested.
Let’s see how well this all goes, shall we?
Bitcoins Accepted