Showing results for 2010 - Page 5 of 36 - The Old New Thing

(The strangely-phrased subject line is for search engine optimization.) A customer reported that when they called , the function sometimes fails with , depending on what they are trying to execute. (If they had tried they would have gotten the error .) After a good amount of back-and-forth examing file type registrations, a member of the develo...

The answer depends on which "hard drive almost full" warning you're talking about. Note that these boundaries are merely the current implementation (up until Windows 7). Future versions of Windows reserve the right to change the thresholds. The information provided is for entertainment purposes only. The thermometer under the drive icon in M...

We all know that once you start measuring something, people will change the way they behave. We hope that the change is for the better, but that's not always the case, and that's especially true if you are using the metrics as a proxy for something else: People will manipulate the metric without necessarily affecting the thing that your metric is ...

James Risto asks, "Is there a way to change the behavior of the CMD.EXE window? I would like to add a status line." The use of the phrase "the CMD.EXE window" is ambiguous. James could be referring to the console itself, or he could be referring to the CMD.EXE progarm. The program running in a console decides what appears in the console. If yo...

When you change folders in a common file dialog, the common file dialog calls to match the directory you are viewing. (Don't make me bring back the Nitpicker's Corner.) Okay, the first reaction to this is, "What? I didn't know it did that!" This is the other shoe dropping in the story of the curse of the current directory. Now the question is, ...

We saw last time that your debugging code can be a security vulnerability when you don't control the current directory. A corollary to this is that your delayload code can also be a security vulnerability, for the same reason. When you use the linker's delayload functionality to defer loading a DLL until the first time it is called, the linker i...

Remember, the bad guys don't care that your feature exists just for debugging purposes. If it's there, they will attack it. Consider the following code: When you need to debug the program, you can install the DLL into the application directory. The code above looks for that DLL and if present, gets some function pointers from it. For illust...

The current directory is both a convenience and a curse. It's a convenience because it saves you a lot of typing and enables the use of relative paths. It's a curse because of everything else. The root cause of this curse is that the Windows NT family of operating systems keeps open a handle to the process's current directory. (Pre-emptive ...

Chrissy wants to know if there is a bias towards Microsoft products in the selection of most frequently used programs on the Start menu. The only bias is in the initial default MFU list, the one that appears upon a fresh login. In Windows XP, the default Start menu MFU contains six slots. The first three point to Windows applications, and t...

Public Service Announcement: Daylight Saving Time ends in most parts of the United States this weekend. Andy points out that if you attempt to synchronize your clock when the date is set incorrectly, the operation fails with the error message "An error occurred while Windows was synchronizing with time.windows.com. For security reasons, Windows ca...