If you enable “Show icon in the notification area when connected” for your LAN or other network device, a small icon will blink on and off in the system tray, which gives you a simple visual indication of network activity.
One day I noticed that this icon was solid … always. I double-clicked on the icon to see the number of packets passing to and from the Local Area Connection. Read the rest of this entry »
Archive for the ‘Troubleshooting’ Category
The Case of the Unknown Network Traffic
Posted by William Diaz on February 14, 2011
Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Networking | 2 Comments »
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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Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Networking, Process Monitor | Leave a Comment »
Inside Windows – Office Repair vs. Reinstall
Posted by William Diaz on February 3, 2011
All of you have at one point or another had to troubleshoot an issue with Office that required you to repair or reinstall Office. Have you ever wondered why these two options exist and what they do differently from the other? The answer is in a single parameter attached to the command and this parameter can sometimes make all the difference.
Microsoft KB article 298027 states:
There is a subtle difference between these two options and you will want to make sure you choose the appropriate option based on your situation. In either case, the Windows Installer /f command line switch is being called. The difference is in the parameters that are being attached to the /f switch.
Note You can also perform a Repair procedure from any of the Office programs by clicking Detect and Repair on the Help menu. This procedure is the same procedure that is performed when you click the Detect and repair errors in my Office installation command in Maintenance mode. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Inside Windows, Troubleshooting | Tagged: Office | Leave a Comment »
The Case of the Outlook Send Email Hangs
Posted by William Diaz on February 3, 2011
Process Explorer can often times give you clues to hung processes. Simply open the hung process and go to the Threads tab. Take this case here where Outlook was hanging and showing significant CPU usage while trying to send an email. I started by identifying the hung thread. In this case, CPU time and CSwitch Delta columns make this obvious. Select the thread and double-click it or click the Stack button to see the state of the stack. The stack reads from bottom to top. Look at the most recent frames for clues to the problem. In this case, mshtml.dll stands out:
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Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Hang, Outlook, Process Explorer | 2 Comments »
A Faulting Module Is Not A Broken Module
Posted by William Diaz on January 14, 2011
It is not usually the case that a “faulting” module is the actual cause of an application error, crash, or hang. Take this example where Outlook was crashing each time after the user opened Outlook: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Crash, Outlook | Leave a Comment »
Zipity Do Da .Docx
Posted by William Diaz on December 28, 2010
It’s a mystery how some files get their file extensions changed or removed. I have no doubt that some users think that manually changing it makes it compatible with whatever program they want it to open in. We often get files that contain a .doc extension but fail to open in Word. Sometimes they are corrupted, sometimes they are in a newer version of Word, and sometimes they are not Word documents at all. When you run into these, the easiest way to determine what kind of file it is is to open it with Notepad (or any text reader for that matter) and look for readable text in the data. Here is an example:
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Posted in Office, Troubleshooting | Tagged: Word | Leave a Comment »
Outlook, HTML Messages, and Internet Explorer
Posted by William Diaz on December 28, 2010
If you didn’t already know, Outlook 2003 and earlier use IE as its print engine when printing html formatted messages. This means you sometimes need to go to IE to correct problems with emails printing outside of the print margins. These settings are found under File > Page Setup. The defaults are 0.75 on all sides. When coming across issues like this, I often find the margins set to 0.25.
This behavior is not the same for all html formatted messages. Some emails have web content embedded or pasted into them and will have odd page characteristics that cause the message to print outside the margins and may be difficult to correct. Different versions of IE also handle html messages differently.
In Office 2007/2010, html messages in Outlook no longer rely on IE and now use a MS Office html as the printing engine.
Posted in Inside Windows, Troubleshooting | Tagged: Internet Explorer, Outlook, Printing | Leave a Comment »
Why is my Outlook Message Full of ATTXXXXX.htm, .txt, and .dat Attachments?
Posted by William Diaz on December 16, 2010
Every now and then you might encounter a message that contains ATTXXXXX.htm attachment(s): 
If you try to open these, by default they will launch in IE but not open anything or may not display anything meaningful. The reason for this is that the attachment is just a fragment of formatting code from the message body, i.e. html tags. You can see this by right-clicking in the page and selecting View Source:
Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Outlook | 3 Comments »
Troubleshooting Office 2007/2010 Files
Posted by William Diaz on December 13, 2010
The Office 2007/2010 native file format is now xml based. What does this mean to you troubleshooters? Earlier versions of Office files, for example Word, saved all the formatting, text, images, etc as a single binary file. With the latest Office offering, all those document “elements” are now created as xml files and then compressed into a single file. To see this, take any docx, pptx, xlsx file and change the extension to zip. When you open with Windows compressed files or WinZip, you will see different folders that contain several xml files, which contain the formatted text, pictures or other media. Here is an example of one of my blog Word 2010 articles dissected:
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Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Office | Leave a Comment »
The Case of the Zip File That Wouldn’t Open
Posted by William Diaz on December 8, 2010
While trying to extract the SysInternal PSTools.zip, I was running into the following error: “The Compressed (zipped) Folder is invalid or corrupted.”
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Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Networking, Process Monitor | 2 Comments »
Windows Explored 