The Old New Thing

November 2012 - Page 2 of 3 - The Old New Thing

How do I use group policy to improve security of USB thumb drives in my organization?

November 20, 2012 Nov 20, 2012 11/20/12
Raymond Chen
A customer wanted to know how they could improve the security of USB thumb drives in their organization. Specifically, they wanted to block access to removable media devices (primarily USB thumb drives), but provide a list of exceptions for specific thumb drives. Fortunately, there's a whitepaper that covers exactly this topic and explains ...

Microspeak: touch base

November 20, 2012 Nov 20, 2012 11/20/12
Raymond Chen
The verb phrase touch base is in general business jargon use, but it's quite popular at Microsoft. To touch base with someone is to contact someone in a lightweight and mostly-informal sort of way. In other words, it takes the form of a piece of email or a brief office visit rather than a formal meeting with an agenda. Bob, can you touch ...

Raymond's podcast list (for 2011, at least)

November 19, 2012 Nov 19, 2012 11/19/12
Raymond Chen
Ry Jones wants to know what other podcasts I subscribe to. Remember, I wrote this back in 2011. Here's what I listen to. Note that I am not averse to fast-forwarding over parts that don't interest me, such as when they discuss a movie that I simply don't care about...

How do I forward an exported function to an ordinal in another DLL?

November 16, 2012 Nov 16, 2012 11/16/12
Raymond Chen
The syntax for specifying that requests to import a function from your DLL should be forwarded to another DLL is This says that if somebody tries to call from , they are really calling in . This forwarding is done in the loader. Normally, when a client links to the function , the loader says, "Okay, let me get the address of the ...

Microsoft Money crashes during import of account transactions or when changing a payee of a downloaded transaction

November 13, 2012 Nov 13, 2012 11/13/12
Raymond Chen
Update: An official fix for this issue has been released to Windows Update, although I must say that I think my patch has more style than the official one. You do not need to patch your binary. Just keep your copy of Windows 8 up to date and you'll be fine. For the five remaining Microsoft Money holdouts (meekly raises hand), here's a ...

Why are taskbar live previews lost when you use Fast User Switching?

November 12, 2012 Nov 12, 2012 11/12/12
Raymond Chen
Anonymous asks a metric buttload of questions, which means that I feel compelled to answer all or none. And given the choice, I decided to answer none. Okay, I will answer one and ignore the rest. Why are taskbar live previews lost when you use Fast User Switching? When you switch away from a user via Fast User Switching, the Desktop ...

Thread affinity of user interface objects: Addendum

November 9, 2012 Nov 9, 2012 11/9/12
Raymond Chen
Some time ago, I discussed the thread affinity of device contexts, noting that the and functions must be called from the same thread. The same restriction also applies to printer DCs. Printer DCs must be created and destroyed on the same thread. The printing team imposed this additional rule in order to make it easier for printer driver ...