After receiving a newly imaged workstation, one of our trainers noticed that the Use Aero Peek to preview the desktop feature was grayed out in the Task Bar properties:
Archive for the ‘Troubleshooting’ Category
Troubleshooting Disabled or Missing Aero Features
Posted by William Diaz on July 13, 2012
Posted in Troubleshooting | 1 Comment »
Internet Explorer 9 Install Fail
Posted by William Diaz on July 11, 2012
While troubleshooting some bizarre behavior in IE, I decided the only way to fix the problem was to uninstall IE 9 and reinstall it. To remove IE 9, you go to the Program Features > View installed updates and locate the IE 9 install under Microsoft Windows. One reboot later I ran the IE 9 installer and encountered the generic Windows Internet Explorer 9 failure message: “Internet Explorer did not finish installing…”
Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Internet Explorer | 3 Comments »
“Run As Administrator” Blocked
Posted by William Diaz on July 8, 2012
Just yesterday while taking a tour of my kids Standard User account on one of my Windows 7 system’s, I noticed I was unable to right-click a program and elevate it. The follow error was returned: “This program is blocked by group policy. For more information, contact your system administrator.”
Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Malware | 1 Comment »
Sometimes Its Better To Modify Than To Delete
Posted by William Diaz on July 8, 2012
We disable Outlook PSTs within our organization via group policy. This setting resides in the registry at HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\14\Outlook and is enforced with a DWORD value equal to 1. In some cases, though, we allow certain uses to continue to use PSTs. Those who do use PSTs, however, don’t necessarily have the ability to move items into these PSTs. That, too, is also disabled by creating a DWORD called PstDisableGrow in HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\office\14.0\outlook\PST. If the value is to enable this, then you will encounter the following warning or error message when trying to copy or move item(s) into the PST: “Cannot copy the items. You don’t have appropriate permission to perform this operation”
Posted in Office, Troubleshooting | Tagged: Outlook | Leave a Comment »
The Case of the Missing Task Manager and Registry Editor part II (Windows Advanced ToolKit Malware)
Posted by William Diaz on June 28, 2012
I was originally introduced to this by co-worker who wanted me to look at someone’s netbook and wrote about it here. The malware-scareware program had already been removed from the system, but the damaged it done had been left behind. Cleaning it up manually, though, would not be too difficult. As pointed out, its counters the user attempt to stop it by taking advantage of a built in process that Windows uses for debugging applications by pointing the Task Manager and Regedit to its own fake anti-virus process. Further, it also counters anti-malware utilities and virus security suites by creating reg keys and using the same Debugger string to point to svchost.exe, which is not able to run other executables. The key to getting access to the registry and the task manager directly was to use AutoRuns.
As it happened, a couple days ago the wife starts complaining that she keeps getting persistent firewall popups. I told her to click allow and let me sleep. Then she mentioned another popup that she says is scanning the system and finding virus. This sounds like classic scareware and when I take a look I see this:
Posted in Troubleshooting, Troubleshooting Tools | Tagged: Malware | Leave a Comment »
When RDP “Disconnects”, It Might Be Crashing
Posted by William Diaz on June 18, 2012
It was reported by a local office technician that over the course of a few days several users were connecting to a site over the web that used Remote Desktop Connection to connect a remote desktop/terminal services session. Shortly after connecting, users complained the their session was being disconnected. The issue was initially troubleshot as possibly a local setting in the OS, such as the IE proxy or maybe the TMG firewall client, but switching to different proxy made no difference. It was then assumed that perhaps our network work was part of the problem. Port issue? Not likely, ports 443 and 3389 are too common and since the users were able to connect initially, this could be eliminated as the cause. Last, the remote site technical support was contacted and asked at what point inactive sessions were being dropped. The answer to that was 1 hour and so this, too, was eliminated as the cause.
Eventually, the issue made it my way, and the first thing I thought was that this was not specifically a “disconnect”. When I think disconnect, I’m thinking along the lines of excessive packet loss or corruption between the client and the server which results in a dropped connection. Another cause for a disconnected application could be that the client app or one of its components that handles the connection is crashing. To confirm my suspicion, I asked the local tech to provide me the name of one of the affected workstations. All the affected workstation were running Windows XP, which meant that if the RDP client was crashing, the post mortem debugger might be capturing this. I navigated across the network to \\computername\c$\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Dr Watson and saw a recent drwtsn32.log and user dump.
Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Crash | Leave a Comment »
Making My Unusable USB Stick Usable Again
Posted by William Diaz on June 11, 2012
I had a USB flash device that just stopped working suddenly. When I plugged it in, the following message popped up in Windows: “You need to format the disk in drive before you can use it.”
That was odd because earlier it was formatted with FAT32 and seemed to be working normally (copied files to it). Luckily, I didn’t have anything important stored on it, clicked Format disk and was the presented with the format options and selected Start.
Posted in Troubleshooting, Troubleshooting Tools | 57 Comments »
Windows SDK Setup Failure
Posted by William Diaz on June 7, 2012
While trying to install one of the utilities within the Windows SDK, the setup was failing. Clicking the View Log option within the SDK Setup GUI pulls up the log (you can also find it at C:\%user%\AppData\Local\Temp\SDKSetupLog.txt). I scanned to the end of the log and saw these details:
MSI (s) (60:D8) [12:10:44:541]: Windows Installer removed the product. Product Name: Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 (7.1). Product Version: 7.1.30514. Product Language: 1033. Manufacturer: Microsoft Corporation. Removal success or error status: 0.
12:10:39 PM Wednesday, June 06, 2012: SFX C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1\Setup\SFX\vcredist_x64.exe installation started with log file C:\Users\w7test06\AppData\Local\Temp\Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7_f83227e1-caa8-4d71-a809-43745c870815_SFX.log
12:10:43 PM Wednesday, June 06, 2012: C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1\Setup\SFX\vcredist_x64.exe installation failed with return code 5100
12:10:44 PM Wednesday, June 06, 2012: [SDKSetup:Error] Config_Products_Install: Installation of Product Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 (failed): Please refer to Samples\Setup\HTML\ConfigDetails.htm document for further information. Stack: at SDKSetup.Product.ConfigureRelatedSfx() at SDKSetup.Product.ConfigureNewProduct(ManualResetEvent CancelEvent)
12:10:44 PM Wednesday, June 06, 2012: [SDKSetup:Info] Config_Products_InstallNew: End installation of new product: Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7
It looks like there is an issue with the version of the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable 2010 x64 currently installed on the system.
I removed both the x64 and x86, ran the SDK setup again and the installation was successful. Slightly earlier versions of both redistributables were installed:
SDK setup also seems to be sensitive to environmental variable TEMP if it is anything else besides %temp% as noted in an earlier blog.
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The Case of the Missing Task Manager and Registry Editor
Posted by William Diaz on June 5, 2012
I was recently given a netbook to look at after it was hit by some malware. The malware exe had already been removed but it left a few common system utilities like the Task Manager and the Windows Registry Editor in a dysfunctional state. Furthermore, popular anti-malware utilities and anti-virus utilities were also not able to run. For example, trying to run taskmgr.exe or regedit produced the following error: “Windows cannot find ‘C:\Windows\system32\taskmgr.exe’…”
Posted in Troubleshooting, Troubleshooting Tools | Tagged: Autoruns, Malware | 3 Comments »
Some Emails May Prompt You To Install Foreign Language Pack
Posted by William Diaz on June 4, 2012
From time to time, we have seen some standard company emails as well as non-company emails throw the following message prompt when clicking on or opening: “Language pack installation. To display language characters correctly you need to install the following language pack…”
Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Outlook | 1 Comment »
Windows Explored 