Windows Explored

Everyday Windows Desktop Support, Advanced Troubleshooting & Other OS Tidbits

Archive for February 10th, 2011

The Case of the Offline Chat

Posted by William Diaz on February 10, 2011


Among the various types of operations Process Monitor traces, TCP/UDP activity is often overlooked. If you want to examine packets, Process Monitor is not going to do it for you. But it can sometimes present some important clues to a problem and point you in the right direction.

In the case here, our user was not able to get our in-house chat program to go online. You can usually force this by selecting the “List” button, but after several seconds of “Loading…” it would go back to offline. In hopes of finding something revealing, I opened Process Monitor from our lab and set a filter for the executable of the chat program. There were only a dozen operations but the ones that stood out were the last 5 UDP Send operations.
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IE’s index.dat

Posted by William Diaz on February 10, 2011


I find myself working remotely on various issues all the time. Often, it is quite late and there is no line of communication with the affected user (and sometimes the technician that escalated the issue). That was the case recently. I needed to obtain an unpublished secure URL to a login portal to recreate and correct a problem. This information should have been included in the incident but was not. In our IT environment, we enforce “Empty Temporary Internet Files folder when browser is closed” through group policy; additionally, earlier troubleshooting had resulted in the IE History and Cookies being deleted. As a result, I would not be able to go through any of the files stored in the temporary Internet folder to find the URL I was looking for.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Read the rest of this entry »

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