Dosboy's Bits and Bytes

The other day I was downloading some stuff off the interweb as I normally do.  Now, I'm usually pretty smart about what I download, the sources I get stuff from, and whether or not I run/open things that might seem a little sketchy.  In other words, I don't use protection.  As you can see here, I have antivirus installed, but the on-access protection is disabled cuz it chews up valuable CPU resources.  At any rate, I had downloaded a big (700mb - can you guess what it was?) series of RAR files.  I opened one of the them and inside it had another RAR file (which was password protected), a README, and an executable called something like RarPasswordGenerator.exe.  The README told me to run the password generator to generate a password for the internal RAR file. 

Immediately red flags went up.  Why would someone package a file within a file, NOT provide the password for the internal file, but include a password generator for it?  So, I carefully extracted the password generator file, right-clicked it and scanned it.  Came back clean.  I actually did this a second time, since I didn't think it possible that this file could be clean, but it appeared to be.  So, I decided to run it.  Immediately Vista's UAC popped it's head up and said something along the lines of "Setup_15382.exe has just been launched.  Are you sure you want to run this file?".  More suspicion, since that's not the name of the file that I actually clicked, so I told Vista to Cancel.  I scanned the file a 3rd time and again it came back clean.  Since I really wanted what was in the internal RAR file (and since I was a little more than tempted in having a RAR password cracker), I decided to go for it.  Ran it again, and this time I told Vista to Allow.  Ho-lee shitballs, was that a mistake.  Immediately my HDD started grinding, explorer crashed and restarted, shortcuts to porn sites started appearing on my desktop, and my machine generally went into chaos.  I'm not going to get into the details of everything that happened (mostly cuz I was freaking out and don't remember the specifics), but suffice it to say that I hit Shutdown as quickly as possible.  What I really should have done was flip the switch on my wireless right away, but I didn't think of that until about a minute later when my machine was in the shutdown phase.  I rebooted to Safe Mode (without Networking) and proceeded to run a full virus scan.  This went on for about 8 hours.  Then I rebooted to normal mode (with my networking physically shut off) and immediately Windows Defender started freaking out.  I let it do it's thing, cleaned up my Run registry keys (which had had about 20 weird looking exe's inserted into them), and killed said processes manually.  I then ran another full scan (Thorough, Include Archive Files) while at the same time running a full Windows Defender scan.  This took about 10 hours.  I then made sure that my antivirus was set for everything enabled at startup and rebooted.  I then ran another scan (Normal, No Archive Files).  After this I carefully enabled my networking (I'm not sure how you "carefully" slide a switch, but if it's possible I did it).  Downloaded Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware and proceeded to run a full scan with that.  All in all the scans and effort took the better part of a day and all told there were over 30 pieces of shit that had been installed on my machine, from worms to trojans to god knows what else.  But, here I am 2 days later with my antivirus on-access protection enabled and so far everything seems good.  Though I did borrow an external HDD from one of the guys here in case I want to back my shit up and just blow my machine away.  Which might be a good idea, but which will also take a long time and is not something I really want to do.  Though given the current weather conditions it may not be such a bad idea.

Moral of this story... always use protection.  Especially in Thailand.

I've been trying to figure out how to do this for awhile now since the on-access scanner really slows down my laptop. Stuff on the 'net points to disabling services, removing the Run registry key via MSCONFIG, etc. All of those answers are bunk. The correct way to do this is as follows:

1. Right-click the avast! system tray icon () and select On-Access Protection Control from the popup menu.
   
2. Click the Details button in the bottom of the window that appears.
3. Click the Terminate button under Provider Actions.
4. Click Yes when the Persist the changes? dialog box appears.
5. Select the next item under Installed Providers and repeat steps 3 and 4.
   
6. Repeat step 5 for each of the Installed Providers, or whichever ones you don't want running on startup.

The advantage to doing this as opposed to disabling avast! completely is that you still get the startup scan and you're still able to scan files on-demand. I don't know why it took me so long to figure this out, but it is what it is. Hopefully it helps some people out there.

Who could possibly imagine that Vista is such a piece of shit? I mean, it's not like this is Microsoft's first foray into OS development. But it sure seems like it is. For the record, DOS was far more stable and predictable. Anyway, without further adieu, on to my latest Vista issues.

Telnet
It seems that, by default, the Telnet client is not installed. That is, telnet.exe. Why MS would choose not to include this 211 kB executable in the default install (when they've included it in every version of Windows prior, including 95) is beyond me. But for those of you who need this and don't know how to install it, here's what you do.

Disappearing System Tray Icons
Booted up my machine the other day and for some reason the Volume and Wireless icons didn't appear in my System Tray. I'd seen this before, but another reboot always fixed it. This time however no matter how many times I rebooted they just wouldn't appear. I'm not going to go into the specifics of the issue as they're documented here, but the fix follows.

1. Run regedit.exe
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion \TrayNotify
3. Delete the IconStreams and PastIconStreams values
4. Reboot

Now, I'm no n00b when it comes to editing the registry, but having to edit it for this seems like a HUGE oversight on the part of MS. Utterly ridiculous.


Folder View FUBAR
This has got to be one of the most frustrating aspects of Vista. Vista just seems to randomly change folder views on me. I don't even know how to explain it. I'll set a folder to Tile view, and I'll go back in later and it'll be List. Or I'll set it to Details with default columns and I'll go back in later and it's changed the columns to music-type (i.e. Artist, Album, Track #, etc.) - not very useful when i'm browsing a folder containing no music files. It truly seems random. I've found this quite detailed list of fixes that can be applied to prevent Vista from doing this. And trust me, this fix list appears quite comprehensive. However as a dumb user, I want Vista's "intelligence" to work for me. If I have a folder of music files I want Vista to display music-related columns (well, ok, I don't really, but a truly dumb user might). Then there's the folders of mixed content. If I have a video file, a music file and an image file all in one folder, what folder type does Vista think this is? Cuz I guarantee no matter what it chooses it'll be wrong. So DON'T CHOOSE ANYTHING. Just use the default. If I as the user want to change the view I'll do so. I don't want my OS trying to outsmart me. Cuz I've yet to meet an OS that can. Suffice it to say that I haven't actually implemented the list of fixes above, mostly because I keep hoping that eventually Vista will settle on a folder view for each of my folders which is actually correct. Or MS will issue a fix. Also, I'm lazy. And a dumb user. Really though, I can't stress the dumb user bit enough. If my mom was using Vista (god forbid) and her folder views switched on her all the time she'd be lost, and most likely think that she'd done something wrong. And there's no way in hell she'd go through the fix list above, let alone even think to do so or even search for such fixes. We're not talking power user scenarios here. We're talking simple folder views. I never had any such problem under XP, but then XP never tried to outsmart me. In fact, I used to sort of get off on stuff like this. Problem solving and troubleshooting new OS "features" for deployment and such. But this issue is just fucked. It's unpredictable, which is never a good thing when supporting a mass deployment. Thank god I'm just a hack now and not actually an IT specialist. Cuz I'd hate to have to support this in the field, especially on a mass scale of hundreds or thousands of machines.

I just learned something new about Vista 64 (and maybe 32 - not sure). In addition to the common HKLM\...\Run and HKCU\...\Run registry keys, there's a new one that they've introduced that had all kinds of startup crap hiding under it. This key is HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. Just take a peek in there and look at all the crapware! So in total there now seem to be 3 different Run registry keys.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

For those of you that have no idea what I'm talking about, don't worry about it. For those of you that do, does anyone know of any other new Vista startup keys that might have speed crippling apps forced upon me?

I need to get into a better mindset than I was in the previous post, so I figure I'll regale what I believe to be the most awesome usage of a tablet PC ever.

Got the offer on my condo. It was emailed to my realtor as a PDF. She forwarded it to me. I printed the PDF to Windows Journal, the built-in uber tablet application. Lets you do annotations and write wherever you want, and it shows up as a printer object so you can "print" to it from any application. So anyway, I get the 8 page offer in Windows Journal, do all my changes, signatures, initials, etc. right onscreen, re-print to PDF and re-send to my realtor. So all that paper crap that's normally involved with this sorta thing was totally unnecessary, as was faxing and/or printing. Dealt with the offer 100% electronically. No paper involved. As I've been quoted saying before, paper should only be used in the bathroom (or "toilet" as they say here).

So I believe I have resolved this issue, and I did so inadvertently. Yesterday I was screwing around with Media Player Classic and codecs and installed 64-bit versions of each (Media Player Classic Homecinema x64 here). The new MPC is pretty much like the old one, but with a few more bells and whistles. However what I realized while playing around with this is that 64-bit apps don't use 32-bit codecs, and vice-versa. So it seems that even though Vista will run both 32- and 64-bit apps, the two can not interact with each other. Ended up installing the 64-bit K-Lite codec pack and my 64-bit MPC was purring. Today I thought to myself, "Self... maybe by installing all those 64-bit DirectShow filters you fixed the Media Center issue you were having and can finally use the fancy little remote control that came with your fancy little tx2000z". Well, my self was right. Just loaded up Media Center and was able to play back XviD with no problems at all. Definitely slower and chunkier than MPC, but full use of the remote control is pretty valuable, so I'm sure I'll be using a little bit of a) and a little bit of b) throughout my laptop's life.

I love it when a plan comes together.

I know, it's been awhile since there's been a technology rant, and my loyal fans must be chomping at the bit to know what piece of tech has been my biggest hindrance in the 3 days since I left. Well, what would my first rant be without paying tribute to the biggest pain in my ass since the CONFIG.SYS of OS/2... Vista! Yup, no matter how hard I try to make it purr like a kitten, it never fails to moo like a cow.

So here's the scenario. I'm hanging out with Ken and I think to myself, "I should check my email". So I ask Ken what his wireless settings are and he provides them, with the following caveat - "Are you running Vista? Cuz it doesn't work for some reason. It disconnects every 10 mins requiring a reboot or doesn't work at all. I reloaded XP on my Vista laptop and it works perfectly now". Hmm... this seems odd to me. Not because Vista is bulletproof, but because Ken is a smart guy. So I go through the standard connection rigmarole and it says I'm connected. But I can't surf. DNS resolution seems to be alright, ping/traceroute work fine, IM is connected... but no surfing. Neither Firefox nor IE are able to hit a website. Also, this does not appear to be a wireless issue but rather a full-on networking / TCP/IP issue. So I hop onto Ken's laptop and check my email, firing off a tech support message to Gregg in the meantime as he's actually been doing a little Vista support for awhile now. I get a message back from him awhile later suggesting the following things:

1. Network Discovery (as in disable the bastard) - http://www.home-network-help.com/network-discovery.html
2. Disable IPv6

Well, whaddya know but option (1) did the trick. It still seems that after a few hours I lose HTTP again, but that's far more acceptable than the previous situation, especially since I'm not going to be here all that long. So, the long and short of it is that MS has made Vista too "smart" for its own good. I shouldn't have to disable a feature like this just to surf the web (especially since the actual usage of Network Discovery is to detect other network devices LOCALLY; shouldn't have anything to do with what's beyond my gateway). Effing Microsoft. Effing Vista.

As promised, here's my latest Vista rant. Before I begin, I must point out that I still get multiple hits a day from searches on "I fucking hate vista", which I find totally amusing. Hopefully this post will bump me up in the "fucking hate vista" pagerank :)

Anyway, I got my new lappy on Thursday. It came with a neat little remote control that fits in the ExpressCard slot. On this remote control is a Media Center button which launches, you guessed it, Media Center. So, since I like to play dumb user whenever possible, I decided that I'd use this remote and Media Center as my primary media playback combination. Sure, Media Player Classic is really my video player of choice. Winamp is my audio player of choice. And MediaPortal is my 10' UI of choice. But no matter. I have Vista Ultimate on a shiny new laptop with a shiny new remote control, so let's pretend I don't know any better.

First thing I did was add my Download directory to the video files section so that it scans this directory and picks up my TV show (specifically Entourage) downloads. Unfortunately at the time I didn't have any TV shows in that folder or any subfolders. No matter though, because they'd eventually be there and OF COURSE Windows would be smart enough to know that subdirectories are to be included even if none actually existed when I added it to the config, right? WRONG! So once I had some stuff downloaded I had to remove and re-add the directory, making sure at this point to check the "include subdirectories" checkbox (which obviously didn't exist when there weren't any). Fine, I'll concede that point (even though I shouldn't have to, but it's Vista after all).

I get the directory indexed and see my nice new episodes of Entourage. I click one to play... Error! Oh, I forgot to install the XviD codec I think, so my bad. I'll concede another point here (even though the error message actually said it couldn't FIND the episode I'd JUST CLICKED ON when it actually should have told me it didn't have the appropriate codec, but no matter). I install XviD and all of the other Gordian Knot niceties. I test in Windows Media Player. All is good. I relaunch Media Center, navigate to the Videos folder and click on an episode. Error! Same as before. Can't find the file. WTF?! Do a little googling and find this site. Oh, it seems that I need a third party plugin and the latest ffdshow (which I generally don't use to play XviD). Alright, fine. I'm not conceding this point to Vista, but I'll jump through a couple of hoops. I download the x64 plugin version (cuz I'm running Vista Ultimate x64), do the config, make sure I have the latest ffdshow, and that it's configured to play XviD files. All seems good. I launch Media Center, navigate to the Videos folder and click on an episode. Crash! As in Media Center just hard crashed back to desktop. Boo!

So, what did I learn from this experience? Well, Media Center sucks ass (actually, I didn't learn that... I already knew it, but in playing dumb user I figured I'd go at it with a clean slate). It has nothing to do with the standard Windows media controls and is quite independent of anything else going on in Windows. It doesn't use the standard codecs, and it doesn't let you configure anything at a level beyond dumb user. So what's the solution you might ask? Install (actually just download and run - there is no installer) Media Player Classic (interestingly enough there's a new version out... the first one in a few years). Sure, the Media Player button on my remote doesn't launch it (I have to do that manually) but at least the play/pause/volume buttons work in it. I'm sure I'll find some sort of middleware app at some point that intercepts the remote control's buttons above and beyond the default functions, but in the meantime I can make due. Yay Vista! Yay Media Center! (Please note the dripping sarcasm in the previous two sentences).

Moral of this story... I STILL FUCKING HATE VISTA. And yet, I continue to use it. I must be masochistic at some level.

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UPDATE: Solution to my problem found and documented here. Everything works like a charm now.

I've been having an issue with the aforementioned combination since I upgraded to Vista. Every time I click a link in an email in Outlook I get a General Failure error message box, but Firefox still opens correctly and goes where I told it. Initially when looking for a fix for this I couldn't find anything, but today I started searching again and found this post. And the fix works beautifully. For your convenience I'll repost it here.

Create a reg file containing the following:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\FirefoxURL\shell\open\ddeexec]
@=""

Save it. Run it. Voila. No more errors.

Vista. Need I say more?

Vista has all kinds of crap built into it which is apparently meant to provide an extra level of safety to dumb users. This, in and of itself isn't a bad thing. But it becomes a bad thing when this "protection" can not be disabled and impedes application developers. UAC is an obvious example, but if you know what you're doing you can disable this. Ironically, I haven't yet, as I actually don't find it very intrusive. However I did have an issue when installing Visual Studio and all its components that the Windows Mobile 5 templates didn't install properly (i.e. at all). Apparently this is a problem caused by UAC. I read somewhere (wish I'd furled it) that the reason this fails is that some script tries to run during the install and since it's a separate process from the installer it runs under normal rights, doesn't know enough to ask for elevated rights, and fails. Silently. This isn't a huge deal as this particular install was my first Vista install, so I'm bound to reinstall (correctly) at some point in the near future. But it's a PITA.

So the other day I wanted to set up MaxiVista so that I could extend my laptop's display to my HTPC (projector). If you don't know what it is (and you're not running Vista) check it out. It's a really cool app that lets you use a second PC as a secondary monitor. Sure, you can't run games or video on it, but it still comes in really handy. Specifically, I was reading a PDF on my laptop and just wanted to throw it up on the projector so that my buddy could read it. But I didn't want to have to copy the file, remote control the HTPC, install Acrobat (cuz who the hell installs Acrobat on an HTPC) and load the file. Way too many steps. Anyway, back to the rant. I d/l the demo of MaxiVista to try it out, and it says very clearly that "Windows Vista is only supported in classic display mode with XPDM drivers". When you dig in a little what this means is

1. MaxiVista does consequently not support the Aero display mode. (or essentially any driver that does support Aero, whether running Aero or not)
2. Windows Vista generally does not allow you to log on to remote PCs using any 3rd party software "for your safety". This means, that the new MaxiVista feature to use the viewer program as a service and to log onto the secondary PC via the remote control feature does not work.
3. Windows Vista x64 disallows to install software with unsigned drivers "for your safety". As MaxiVista drivers are not signed, it does not work under Windows Vista 64 Bit OS.

Now, #3 isn't a huge deal, as there is a way to tell Vista64 to allow unsigned drivers. Not sure where I stole this from, but if you need to do that, here's the steps:

run CMD as Administrator
bcdedit /set loadoptions DDISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS
reboot

But #1 and #2, afaik, are impossible to get around until MaxiVista updates their product. Now, I understand that new OSes will cause compatibility issues and such, but any "feature" that is in place to protect the end user should have the option to disable it. MS isn't using this computer, I am. And if I want an "unsafe" or "unprotected" experience, I should be allowed to have that.

Message to Microsoft: You're not in the condom business. Stop trying to protect me "for my own good" and give me some function.

So I keep having the problem described here. No matter what I do, whenever I connect via USB I get a sync error. However Bluetooth seems to be working. I don't mind doing all my sync'ing via Bluetooth, but I need to be able to charge the Q over USB (especially if I'm constantly using Bluetooth). So I decided to disable the Allow USB connections checkbox in WMDC > Mobile Device Settings > Connection Settings. Now I can charge off of USB and sync reliably using Bluetooth.

Yee Haw!

Things were going along well for awhile (with the exception of that Bluetooth issue mentioned here). But over the last few days I've noticed that when I plug the Q in via USB things are odd. Right now for example, the Q is plugged in. ActiveSync says it's connected. But Vista (WMDC) is reporting an error, details of which are:

Synchronization could not be completed. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=72544.

That link takes you to the main MS Windows Mobile page, here. Utterly useless. The only references I can find to the error code, 0x8007274a, are regarding older versions of ActiveSync, and nothing relating to Vista. I suppose I could try the crap outlined here (4th post down) and adapt it to Vista, but that seems like a real pain.

I just looked down at the Q and ActiveSync said it was sync'ing. Wheel just spinning, nothing happening, error message in Vista. So I disconnect the USB cable and sync via Bluetooth. Works perfectly. ActiveSync on the Q says it's connected. WMDC on Vista has a nice little green checkmark.

Why is this tech so flaky? Where are my log files with some sort of useful information? Bah.

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Update: See here for a mediocre workaround.

I had a helluva time finding this, so now that I have I'm blogging it in hopes that it will help others.

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Signatures

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UPDATE: Wanted to add something here since this post is probably the most popular one on my blog (possibly next to the "I FUCKING HATE VISTA" one). The location is actually:

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Signatures

Where %USERPROFILE% is an environment variable (you can see what this is by opening a command prompt and typing "set"). You can also just copy/paste the above path into your Explorer address bar and it'll open to that folder. In 99.9% of cases it'll be what's listed above, but if you've got a sneaky sysadmin or you just like to fuck with environment variables then it could be in a location other than C:\Users.

I don't. At all. I really need to tag all these posts at some point so that I can just keep a list of unresolved, stupid Vista issues. And yes, even though this is a Firefox issue, I blame Vista. Maybe I'm wrong in doing so, but I doubt it.

What's the latest you might ask? Well, lately Firefox has just been blanking out on me. I mean, I have a dozen tabs open, then all of a sudden they all disappear and the current page just blanks out and becomes the Firefox grey background. And becomes totally unresponsive. The only thing I can do is to close it. But when I open it again it doesn't ask me if I want to restore my session. So I lose all the tabs I had open. They're in my history, but it's still a PITA.

And that stupid keyboard flipping issue described here keeps happening. Typing along merrily and all of a sudden French characters start appearing everywhere. Close the app, relaunch it, back to English.

Alright, post tagged "VISTA", except in hex, cuz that's how DOS would do it :)

I'm sitting here about to shut down my laptop, so I try to close Outlook. Nothing happens. I hit the X in the upper right a dozen times, nothing happens. Outlook is still plugging away, happy as a pig in shit (hmm... Outlook = pig; Vista = shit; interesting analogy). I hit File > Exit and nothing happens. It's not even that Outlook's not responding, cuz it is. Everything is snappy, I can navigate folders, write emails, etc. I just can't close the bastard.

Why is it that we're supposed to upgrade again? Oh ya, cuz MS tells us to. And stops selling the functional versions to make room for the headache versions. They're probably in cahoots with Tylenol or Advil.

People actually search on the term "fucking hate vista". It's one of my top referrers (leading to this page). That's funny.

Having wireless issues. Connection up and down. Probably not Vista's fault. But in trying to re-establish the connection, Windows Live Messenger decided to barf. It was not signed in, but I did not have a sign-in option either (greyed out). And this is what it looked like:


Now, I may not have a lot of friends, but I'm sure I have more than that.

Every day a new reason surfaces for my hatred of Vista. Today it was SQL Express being unable to browse particular directories. Turned out to be a combination of Symbolic Links and NTFS Permissions. Then just now (and this happens repeatedly, at least a few times a week) Outlook just stops responding. Sits there. I click it, it greys-out. I click it again and nothing happens. I close it and it tells me it's not responding (duh!) and that I should wait while Windows tries to figure out what's wrong. Unless it's planning on formatting my drive and reinstalling with XP, it won't ever figure it out.

ARGH!

Problem: You have virtual NICs installed in Vista (via VMWare, VPN clients or whatever). Every time you boot up your machine Vista detects these NICs as Unidentified Network. And it considers them Public. And it enables your firewall with no exceptions. You try to rename the but Vista won't let you. You set them to Private but the next boot they're back to Public. WTF?!

Solution: Turns out Vista groups all unidentified NICs under one heading, Unidentified Network. If you only have one, you can rename it and tell Vista it's Private. But if you have more than one it won't let you do anything. So, disable all but one of the offending NICs. Give it a name. Set it to Private. Enable the next NIC. Wash, rinse, repeat.

With all of Vista's integrated help and shit, you'd assume that there'd be some hint of this somewhere. I know other people had this problem as I found dozens of forum posts asking how to do what I've described above, but no solution. And this one I just kind of stumbled upon because I'd disabled all my VMWare NICs, then reinstalled VMWare, then disabled them, then launched a VM (which obviously had no networking) then began poking around in VMWare's NIC mappings, enabled only the one NIC that I needed, then realized I was able to change its properties.

Also note that this has only been tested on 2 machines - mine and Conan's. And as we all know, if you haven't done something successfully 3 times in a row it could just be a fluke.

Why does this keep happening to me?!?! Is it Vista? Is it Lenovo? WTF?!?!

inhale ... exhale ... inhale ... exhale

Ok... so my effing keyboard keeps changing its character set, but only in a specific application. Happened once here when I was talking to my sister via MSN Messenger, but it was limited to MSN. Now it just happened in Firefox when I was creating this blog entry. My quotes (") were showing up as weird-ass-apostrophes (`). And my question marks (?) were showing up as capital E accent aigu (É). Why does this keep happening?!


P.S. I hate how Blogger's WYSIWYG editor interprets <'s and >'s as HTML. I understand that if I click the "Edit Html" tab it should do that, but not in the "Compose" tab. The "Compose" tab should translate < and > to "&lt;" and ">" respectively.

Wow, that paragraph was hard to figure out manually and get it to display properly.