DISQUS

Happy Birthday dude! Have one for me. :-)

Any time man...

I'm actually trying to figure out how I can make the leap to the newly announced 40D that Canon announced. Not sure how I'm going to pull that one off... I'd REALLY prefer to invest in some L- Series lenses.

umm... depends on who's asking. ;-)

Hey Mike,


Yep... That's pretty much what was going on. Once the thing was active, it was nearly impossible to stop until I rebooted in safe mode.

Finally got it cleared up though, but WHAT A PAIN IN THE ASS!

-KHD

My symptoms seem to have "faded" away. Sorry... I couldn't help myself.

The machine in question is my laptop at work. It's running Win2K SP4. It seems that as I recall, there was an update for IE6 SP1 that I applied that got this mess started in the first place. I took and re-applied SP4 and everything seemed just fine. I went back to Windows Update and applied another update to IE6 SP1, and the problem re-appeared.

I then uninstalled the IE6 SP1 update and the problem went away. This was the GDI+ update that I just removed which concerned me when I started looking into it further. Now, this CAN'T be the same update that started this mess as my problem arose a couple weeks before the GDI+ update even appeared.

So... I've since, re-applied the GDI+ update and come this next week I should see if the symptoms have returned.

In the meantime, I'm going ot see what IE updates have appeared in the past 2 months and see if there are any similar files within the updates.

I'd be interested to hear anyone else's experience with this mess.

-KHD

Now THAT is a cool script!

Thanks for the info Garrett!

-KHD

Thanks... everything went pretty well. Users were pretty pleased. We had numerous comments that users couldn't tell a difference -- JUST what I was shooting for!

One think that REALLY helped speed things up was the steps we took.
- Cleared the user's temporary Internet files,
- Moved the user's contents of "My Documents" folder to a temporary folder,
- Deleted the contents of the TEMP folder within the users profile area.

After performing these three steps, we joined the PC to the domain, rebooted, logged in with the new account, logged out/logged in as local administrator, then copied the user's profile to the new area. Once complete, we moved the user's "My Documents" to the new profile.

Right, wrong or indifferent, it worked like a charm!

;-)

Unfortunately, I've been pre-occupied with other things in my life and haven't had a chance to puruse my referrer log as often as I'd like.

Any more, if it doesn't show up in my mailbox like a comment or trackback, I'm likely to miss it.

However, now that I'm aware of the next one... I'll be on the lookout. ;-)

-KHD

Thanks... he LOVES the lake. :-)

Unfortunately, this is the first that I've heard of the dinner, and of course, I'm a day late. I've been to a couple of dinners at the Crossroads, but a Bothell Blogger dinner would have been cool.

-KHD

If I remember correctly, my only recourse was to restore the database from backup.

-KHD

Most likely the job market. He doesn't want to go into the military or to college. Perhaps the college thing might change in a couple of years, but for now, he needs to get a job!

:-)

Chad,

That's a good point. I hadn't really considered the personal tasks part, I do those as well for many of the same reasons that you pointed out. But I still think that there is a line when it comes to using company resources on company time to answer questions concerning company experiences to make additional money for me.

I agree, being a clock watcher and IT simply don't mix and therefore I would expect some form of flexibility as you point out. But there just seems to be something fundamentally wrong to me to actually make additional $$ to what I'm already being paid while on the company's time.

I suppose, for the sake of my brain, if I was to walk out into the parking lot to participate in the survey via my cell phone, then perhaps I could attribute it to just another "personal task." But even that one is a stretch.

-KHD

Angus,

Thank you for your comments. I've heard conflicting stories as well concerning whether or not MDAC 2.8 resolves the problem or not. I have found, as you pointed out, that the removal of the speech and handwriting recognition features of MS-Office to be the most effective.

The only thing that I can think of that might suggest MDAC 2.8 resolving the issue is perhaps if it was applied AFTER office was installed as opposed to being installed by default.

Just a thought.

-KHD

Marina,

Thanks for the comment. In all honesty, I wasn't aware that it was St. Brendan's who made an offer during the Brickyard protest. I truly hadn't paid that much attention. I was only aware that 3 different churches had made offers. Additionally, during the two informational meetings that I attended Saturday and Sunday evenings, I learned that the original offer that Father Minder was making was for hosting a tent city perhaps 90 days down the road. It wasn't until the threat of the lawsuit arose did Father Minder commit the churches property, and our neighborhood, for immediate use.

My take isn't that I'm "happy" to see the tent city in my neighborhood, but as long as they live up to their claims, I have no problem with them being here. I realize that they need a place to pitch their tents and I'm willing to do my part as a "good neighbor." However, as I stated, I'm just not pleased about the way that it came about.

As for the Brickyard folks... All I can say is that I'm ashamed of the way that they have portrayed the residents of Bothell. I agree with them 100% though that they too were steamrolled by Ron Sims and Carolyn Edmonds by their stalling since November of 2003, when appropriations were passed regarding this issue (only to be vetoed by Ron Sims). I believe it could have perhaps been handled a little more diplomatically than how it has been depicted over, and over, on the news.

The intent of St. Brendan is to provide these folks, the inhabitants of TC4, with a place to pitch their tents while they continue to negotiate with Ron Sims and King County on a permanent solution. However, it is my opinion, and made pretty evident by the absence of a King County representative during each of the two informational meetings, the negotiations will not be complete by the end of this 90-day period.

With regards to attempting to persuade St Brendan to withdraw its offer, I was simply late to the party. It wasn't until Friday afternoon, when I learned about the agreement between King County, St Brendan, and SHARE/WHEEL, that I took it upon myself to get educated as quickly as possible.

I can't do much at this point except be a good neighbor to my new neighbors, hope that they will do the same, and focus my efforts on getting Ron Sims and the King County Council to act, and to act in a responsible manner upon which they were elected to do so.

Thanks again for the comment

-KHD

I don't think it is/was a problem with Locksmith per se... As Q308402 states, "This error message may occur even though you typed the correct password. If you start Windows XP, successfully log on by using the same password, change the local administrator's password, and restart the computer to Recovery Console, you receive the same error message."

It goes on to say "Sysprep.exe makes changes to the way that password keys are stored in the registry; these changes are not compatible with the Recovery Console logon routine."

I think Locksmith was doing its job, as would have the ntpasswd boot disk. It's just the Sysprep was flawed and caused the problem. The part I don't understand though is... this was supposedly fixed with SP1. I have SP1 installed, why didn't it work? Was it just because I didn't have the C:\CMDCONS installed? I'm going to see if I can't repair this and get my Recovery Console to working.

:-)

Yep... looks like it might be the mouse. The user DID indeed have an external mouse attached to this box. (I should have spotted this one sooner).

Once the problem resurfaced we removed the mouse and all is well again. Going to keep an eye on this machine for a couple more days before stating that it's fixed.

Actually sort of did already. I have the Administrator's Kit from SysInternals. Resetting the password had no effect.

In the end, I had to perform a parallel installation just to get XP to write to the MBR. Didn't even have to fire up the new installation.

I'm back in business now ..AND.. I have the additional 10GB as well.

:-)

I know... I was simply poking fun at my readers, nothing more.

So far it's been great! I'm looking forward to the next one. Best of all though, as I stated, was the reclaiming of time that I'm getting out of it. It's awesome!

Yeah... well I just hope it's not my skull. I haven't invested in a brain bucket for the slopes just yet... but perhaps I should?

:-)

It's a matter of logistics...

1. He attends pre-school from 8:30 until noon
2. His school is on the other side of town, 20+ miles

Since it's only pre-school, we don't feel all that bad if he misses a day here and there. If he were in Kindergarten or higher, we would feel differently.

-KHD

Well, currently I know of 2 Linksys units, my neighbors' and mine. Outside of that 3 block radius though, I did a couple of stumbles on my way home back in August.

http://blog.thedevins.com/archives/000433.php
http://blog.thedevins.com/archives/000436.php

Sorry folks... this topic is boring me to tears. Thanks for all the comments, but I'm shutting them off on this topic.

-KHD

Perhaps you are correct... at least had I not had that morning off due to another commitment.

Thanks for the comment though.

-KHD

Jonathan,

I agree with many of your points and observations. My primary beef is concerning inflexible policies that disrupt productivity. Yes, I too believe in anti virus everywhere. But I don't feel policies should be so inflexible that certain classes of users are penalized for simply doing what they need to do to get their jobs done. By creating such policies, one tends to find those same users taking matters into their own hands and working outside of the system. Now IT is operating in an adversarial role rather than a cooperative working relationship.

If I could move away from McAfee, I would in a hearbeat. Unfortunately, this is a corporate decision that was made by Corporate IT in the U.K. Even when throttling back CPU usage by McAfee it is painful. If the users were at least able to alter the schedule as to when a system scan was performed, it would be a big step forward. But to force a scan at noon every Friday essentially knock developers out of commision of an afternoon.

Thanks for your input, I appreciate your point of view.

-KHD