The Old New Thing

Tips/Support - The Old New Thing

If you cancel an operation while it's in progress, then it's not surprising that it's only half-done

February 18, 2014 Feb 18, 2014 02/18/14
Raymond Chen
A customer (via their customer liaison) started by asking why they were seeing an unexpected access control entry in the security descriptor of an object. The ACEs on the parent grant access to Administrators, CREATOR OWNER, SYSTEM, and Users, but the ACEs on the child object (which should simply have been inherited from the parent) include ...

How do I prevent folders like My Pictures from being recreated?

February 5, 2014 Feb 5, 2014 02/5/14
Raymond Chen
Another converse of How do I programmatically create folders like My Pictures if they were manually deleted? and Why do folders like "My Pictures" come back after I delete them? is How do I prevent folders like My Pictures from being recreated? Starting in Windows 7, there is a group policy called Disable Known Folders which lets you ...

The Visual Effects dialog box just tells you what you want to hear

January 23, 2014 Jan 23, 2014 01/23/14
Raymond Chen
The Visual Effects dialog box has three options, "Let Windows choose what's best for my computer," "Adjust for best appearance," and "Adjust for crappiest appearance best performance." Some people have discovered the registry key where the Visual Effects dialog box remembers which radio button was most recently checked, but they found that ...

The case of the mysterious Alternate Data Stream query

January 7, 2014 Jan 7, 2014 01/7/14
Raymond Chen
A customer was running Windows Server 2003 ("Still in support until 2015!") and they have some custom application that monitors all disk accesses. They noticed that there were a lot of failed Alternate Data Stream queries coming from Explorer, and that was causing the custom application's logs to fill with largely useless information. These ...

Why doesn't the New Folder command work in the root of a redirected drive resource in a Remote Desktop session?

December 17, 2013 Dec 17, 2013 12/17/13
Raymond Chen
When you connect to another computer via Remote Desktop, you have the option of injecting your local drives into the remote computer, known as Device and Resource Redirection. These injected drives are available under the UNC where X is a drive letter on the local machine. The name combines a bunch of internal technical terminology, so it ...

How do I configure the timeout used by UI0Detect (Interactive Services Detection service)?

December 3, 2013 Dec 3, 2013 12/3/13
Raymond Chen
Windows Vista introduced Session 0 Isolation which enforces the rule that services should not display UI. If a service tries to display UI, another service known as the Interactive Services Detection service detects this situation and signals the user that a service wants to display UI and gives the user an opportunity to switch to the ...