Showing tag results for Tips/Support

Somebody on my team reported that a particular script in our project's build process would fail with bizarre output maybe once in fifty tries. This script was run from a , and the result was a failed build. Rerunning make fixed the problem, but that's not much consolation when the build lab encounters it approximately every other day. The strange ...

More than once, I've had a customer ask, "How do I prevent users from dragging and dropping files in Explorer?" Actually, three of them in the past year phrased it in an even more provocative way: "I want to write a program that hooks Explorer and displays a prompt before every drag/drop operation." This is one of those cases where you have to fig...

The Windows 2000 Resource Kit described the policy as consisting of a bitfield whose values are as follows: Hey, wait, two of the entries are the same. What's the difference between 0x1 (Disables Autoplay on drives of unknown type) and 0x80 (Disables Autoplay on drives of unknown type)? The values in the bitfield correspond to return value...

In Windows XP, you could select multiple files, right-click them, then select Properties. The resulting property sheet includes a Security page which lets you edit the security attributes of those files. But when you repeat this exercise on Windows Vista or Windows 7, the Security page is missing. Why doesn't Explorer let you edit th...

Depends on who is setting it.

A customer had a debug trace log and needed some help interpreting it. The trace log was generated by an operating system component, but the details aren't important to the story. I've attached the log file. I think the following may be part of the problem. Any ideas? Thanks, Bob Smith Senior Test Engineer Tailspin Toys What struck me i...

The Windows 7 taskbar automatically groups similar windows, and when you right-click on the grouped icon, you may get fancy stuff like a jump list or a task list, but you will also get a very small repertoire of window management options. In particular, the only option that operates on the group is Close all windows. What about the other group...

Some time ago, I summarized the overlay icons that come with Windows. There have been some changes in Windows 7, so I figured it'd be worth coming up with a new list. A private item is an item where the only user account with access is you.¹ You create one of these, for example, by going to the sharing wizard and saying Share with: No...

Knowledge Base article 139071 has the technically correct but easily misinterpreted title FIX: OLE Automation BSTR caching will cause memory leak sources in Windows 2000. The title is misleading because it makes you think that Oh, this is a fix for a memory leak in OLE Automation, but that's not what it is. The is the string type used by OLE Aut...

This story is inspired by an actual customer problem. The program is used for TPS management, and when you want to create a new TPS report, you have to pick a cover sheet. The program shows you the cover sheets that have been defined, which it loads from the directory. The customer found that on one of the machines, the cover sheets weren't...