Showing results for Tips/Support - The Old New Thing

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 speci...

A customer reported that when their application called the function, it sometimes reported incorrect values. Specifically, the logs collected from clients shows that the first time the program was run on a Windows 7 machine, the operating system was correctly reported as 6.1.7600 (Windows 7), but the second time it was run, the operating...

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 when the...

Windows 8 added a new hotkey: Win+PrtSc takes a snapshot of your screen and puts it into the Screenshots folder of your Pictures library. But what if you are on a tablet with no PrtSc key? On tablets, you can perform the same operation by pressing Windows button + Volume down. Both of these are the hardware buttons on the tablet, not on any ...

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 Altern...

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 makes...

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 servi...

A customer reported that when they opened their Documents library on Windows 7, some files were missing if they selected Arrange by: Name or Arrange by: Author or in fact any arrangement other than Arrange by: Folder. What's going on? When you arrange the Documents library by anything other than Folder, the Documents library uses the content ...

A customer had a question about whether moving a file recalculated inherited permissions. They found that on their Windows Server 2008 R2 machine, if they moved a file between directories with different inheritable ACEs, then the security descriptor is recalculated to match the destination folder, if they perform the move from the machine itse...

From Windows XP to Windows 7, the Start menu showed the programs it thinks you've run most frequently, by employing a conceptually simple but complicated-in-practice algorithm. You can right-click an item on the menu and select Remove from this list. What exactly does this option do? Does it reset the points back to zero, or does it ban...