Windows Explored

Everyday Windows Desktop Support, Advanced Troubleshooting & Other OS Tidbits

Archive for August 5th, 2010

The Case of the Sluggish Email Message (Outlook HTML Gone Crazy)

Posted by William Diaz on August 5, 2010


Upon trying to move an email into our document management system in Outlook, the user reported the following error: “The item could not be deleted, it was either moved or already deleted, or access was denied.” This was odd, because normally this error is seen when items are deleted from shared mailboxes, as this this Microsoft KB article explains. The folder she was trying to move it into was her own document store, which she had full access. Upon trying to move other items, the error was not encountered.

I asked the user to send me the message and at first glance there was nothing special about the email. It was composed of a few short paragraphs with no special formatting beside some text bolding. The user composed these messages on a weekly basis, sent them to herself and then would re-file them into the DMS.

I asked the user to open the message on her system, noticed it was very slow to open, and eventually caused Outlook to become unresponsive. After restarting Outlook and looking at the message in the message pane of the user I noticed it was 1MB in size. This was odd because there was no attachment.
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The Case of the Macro Security Warning

Posted by William Diaz on August 5, 2010


One of our users was being annoyed by the following macro security prompt when opening a PowerPoint presentation: “Security Warning … contains macros.”

It’s not uncommon to see this warning when opening any Office file that contains macros. However, in the case here, the presentation was a simple slide show that, as far as the author knew, contained no macros. I was asked to investigate. I quickly scanned through the slide show and could see no custom actions or anything else that would indicate a macro. In fact, no macros were listed in the macro window: Read the rest of this entry »

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Change Analysis Diagnostic for Windows XP

Posted by William Diaz on August 5, 2010


This is a cool Microsoft utility that allows one to look at what has changed on a PC from a specified date. This comes in handy when you need to troubleshoot a system problem that may be the result of a new or recent app, driver, or update that was recently installed so you can see what has changed on the system since the problem started occurring. The interface is simple and easy enough to use, and when combined with other troubleshooting tools may help isolate the cause. You can read about it and download from here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924732.

Note, to run this with Service pack 3, you need to extract the files from self-extracting exe instead of running directly. You can do this by opening with WinZip or the another zip program. Open the scdiag folder and extract statechangediag.exe and scstyle.xls to a folder. Read the rest of this entry »

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