Showing archive results for 2012

In Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, if you go to a the advanced security settings for a directory and uncheck "include inheritable permissions from this object's parent", then go back to the Sharing tab, you'll find that the "Share" button is disabled. Why is this? We don't see this behavior on Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2. ...

Mike wondered why the system notification icons went colorless in Windows 7 and why they went back to regular tooltips instead of the custom tooltips. I don't know either, so I asked Larry Osterman, who was in charge of the Volume icon. And he didn't know either. He was merely given new icons by the design team. But that doesn't stop me f...

The flag controls how the function treats invalid characters. Some people claim that the following sentences in the documentation are contradictory: "Starting with Windows Vista, the function does not drop illegal code points if the application does not set the flag." "Windows XP: If this flag is not set, the function silently drops il...

This information is accurate as of Windows 7; the algorithm may change for future versions of Windows. The information is being provided for the edification of computer network administrators, who are curious about random stuff like this since it can affect their network load. When you hover over a folder, Explorer shows an infotip (a special...

Via a customer liaison, we received a problem report from a customer. The customer is facing issues with delayed desponses to opening a .lnk file by pressing its keyboard shortcut hotkey. This delay does not appear when the shortcut is double-clicked. For example, the customer has created a shortcut to Notepad and assigned it the shortcut Ctrl+...

In Windows 2000 and Windows XP, you could add Summary information on the Details property page to files of all types. Text files, image files, some crazy file your grandmother sent you in a file format you don't know how to open. If Windows supports storing the Summary information in the file itself (for example, in EXIF tags or in Stru...

I appreciate the help from Christoph and Voo in refining my German. But that reminds me of a story about a friend of a friend. She was in Japan to visit some friends. Although she speaks English and Mandarin fluently, she doesn't know any Japanese, so her friends taught her how to say "Sorry, I don't speak Japanese." She managed to say this sent...

Georg Rottensteiner was curious about the weird things that WinG performed on installation to evaluate video cards. "What did it do actually and what for?" I don't actually know, since I was not involved in the WinG project, but I remember chatting with one of the developers who was working on video card benchmarks. He says that video card benc...

A customer reported that their program would very sporadically crash in the function . The customer was kind enough to provide a stack trace at the point of the crash: The customer wondered, "Could the problem be that my cleanup group does not have a callback? MSDN seems to suggest that this is okay." The exception being thrown is , but that...

A customer wanted to know if "there was a way to hide the properties of a shortcut." We asked for an explanation of the problem they were trying to solve, so we could understand what their question meant. The customer liaison explained: The customer is insisting on this, even though I think it's really the wrong approach. They want to put a passw...