Posted by William Diaz on April 4, 2012
A co-worker asked me a question recently after a user he was talking with put him on the spot by mentioning that one of the icons in the Windows System Tray, specifically the McAfee tray icon, had gone missing. She thought something was awry and wondered if something was done overnight to her workstation to make it disappear or if we had suddenly decided to get rid of it.
Missing: 
Present: 
Posted in Inside Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by William Diaz on April 3, 2012
Every now and then some app somewhere is going to hook into some user file and prevent it from loading when its host application is opening up, resulting in some kind of error. A common one is when opening Outlook: “The file C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\outlook.ost is in use and could not be accessed. Close any application that is using this file, and then try again.” 
Posted in Troubleshooting Tools | Tagged: Outlook, Process Explorer | 1 Comment »
Posted by William Diaz on April 2, 2012
From time to time we have often received complaints about this particular issue. I never really got a chance to troubleshoot beyond the standard “Clear IE cache” rhetoric1 that somehow is the magical non-solution to all IE woes. Well, alas, I finally encountered the issue on the lab PC and spent some time poking around. Here is what the problem looks like:
Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Internet Explorer | Leave a Comment »
Posted by William Diaz on April 2, 2012
I love Autoruns. Think msconfig on steroids. It truly reveals everything that starts up with Windows. Well almost everything. A couple days ago a user complained to me of a popup error they were receiving after logon. I had no doubt I would find the offending process in Autoruns, since the error message revealed the process name: 
Posted in Troubleshooting Tools | Tagged: Autoruns | Leave a Comment »
Posted by William Diaz on April 2, 2012
One of the most common complaints your going to encounter in the desktop support role is when Outlook becomes unresponsive while a user is performing any random task in Outlook, whether it be switching between folders, going into a delegated mailbox, or sorting messages. Often, the knee-jerk reaction by the front line technical support is to assume something is wrong with Outlook and begin the gamut of what I term “blind-troubleshooting”. This usually involves running an range of scripted fixes (that is meant to address issues with some of our in-house or 3rd party add-ins), followed by a repair, reinstall, and/or creation of a new Outlook profile. Over the lifetime of this incident(s), the issue can drag out to several days because usually the issue cannot be reproduced immediately after the first fix, so each additional fix is tried at some point later when the user calls back. In some cases, this drags out for a couple weeks to where the user’s workstation is replaced or Windows profile is recreated.
And all to no avail.
Posted in Troubleshooting, Troubleshooting Tools | Tagged: Hang, Outlook | Leave a Comment »
Posted by William Diaz on March 14, 2012
Since installing the Citrix Receiver on a couple Windows XP workstations (IE7 and IE8), I noticed that sometimes Internet Explorer was getting hung after launching. In all cases, the hang analysis pointed to a dll called IEInterceptor:
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Internet Explorer | 3 Comments »
Posted by William Diaz on March 2, 2012
I came across a Technet blog recently that described an issue where boot performance on newly imaged workstations with Windows 7 and Solid State Drives was inhibited because the Windows System Assessment Tool was disabled in the image. As a result, WinSAT did not detect the presence of the SSD and treated the drive as a normal hard disk (one with platters). This turned out being a big find because our future Windows 7 also had WinSAT disabled. Read about it here: Windows 7, Solid State Drives and Why A WinSAT Score Matters.
Posted in Inside Windows | Tagged: Hardware, Performance | Leave a Comment »
Posted by William Diaz on March 2, 2012
A user called in and requested one of our technicians to assist in removing some annoying autorun applications. Upon opening the Control Panel and going to Add or Remove Programs in Windows XP, the rundll32.exe process was crashing. The same applied for any process that required a CPL to run:
I was asked to assist and started by going to C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\ Dr Watson. I opened the drwtsn32.log and scrolled to the bottom, confirming that some error in rundll32.exe was being encountered: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Crash, Dr Watson, Malware | Leave a Comment »
Posted by William Diaz on March 2, 2012
While trying to import documents into our document management system via Outlook, Outlook would just abruptly close on the user. I started the initial troubleshooting by disabling a couple 3rd party add-ins in HKLM and HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins that were not part of the normal image. This can be done by modifying the load behavior of the add-in (see this MSDN article for details), but this had no effect on correcting the behavior. I thought about capturing a crash dump of Outlook but decided to not waste any time there because, at this point, with the add-ins disabled, I likely was not going to see anything but the document management modules in the dump.
Instead, I turned to Process Monitor; perhaps it might reveal what Outlook was doing just before it crashed and give me some important clues. I set a filter to monitor only outlook.exe, dragged an item into the document management space in Outlook and waited for it to crash after clicking Save. Afterwards, I scrolled to end of the log, working my way up. I also added a filter to only include registry activity and then process and thread activity so I could quickly see where Outlook was crashing: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Office, Troubleshooting | Tagged: Crash, Outlook, Process Monitor | Leave a Comment »
Posted by William Diaz on March 1, 2012
When opening Visio, the user didn’t see the common Menu Bar one normally see in Microsoft Office products before 2007. The menu bar contains the literal menu options like File, Edit, View, Insert, so on. There was also the presence of a 3rd party toolbar that didn’t look like it was properly functioning:
Perhaps the Menu bar was disabled. This can be checked by right-clicking in the menu bar area and selecting Customize, then Toolbars.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Office, Troubleshooting, Troubleshooting Tools | Tagged: Process Monitor | 1 Comment »
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