Remko Weijnen's Blog (Remko's Blog)

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Archive for the ‘General’ Category

After I uninstalled Office 2010 64 bit and installed Office 2010 32 bit I had a problem with Office Communicator 2007 R2.

After entering my password and clicking sign in it crashed every time:

image

In the EventLog an Application Error was recorded with some additional error info:

Event Type: Error Event Source: Application Error Event Category: (100) Event ID: 1000 Date: 10-3-2011 Time: 15:20:52 User: N/A Computer: remkolaptop Description: Faulting application name: communicator.exe, version: 3.5.6907.221, time stamp: 0x4cddcd9f Faulting module name: KERNELBASE.dll, version: 6.1.7601.17514, time stamp: 0x4ce7bafa Exception code: 0xc06d007e Fault offset: 0x0000b727 Faulting process id: 0xf94 Faulting application start time: 0x01cbdf2e592fc53c Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office Communicator\communicator.exe Faulting module path: C:\Windows\syswow64\KERNELBASE.dll Report Id: 9a4e3adf-4b21-11e0-8f0f-c0cb38a92f9b For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

The exception code is 0xc06d007e which is defined in WINERROR.h as ERROR_MOD_NOT_FOUND, the error description is: “The specified module could not be found”.

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  • Office 2010 cannot remove registry key

    I have worked with Office 2010 x64 for a while now but because of compatibility issues I wanted to remove it and install the x86 version instead.

    After uninstall Office left a key in the registry:

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Common\SmartTag\Actions\{B7EFF951-E52F-45CC-9EF7-57124F2177CC}

    I couldn’t remove it so I figured there was a specific process that had opened this key but couldn’t find anything (using Process Explorer).

    Then I checked the permissions on the Office key but it was set to Full Control for Administrators.
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  • The case of the intermittent hangs

    Yesterday I had some intermittent hangs on the family pc, and old Medion MD-8800 PC.

    Since there was no crash and thus no crash dump, there was nothing to debug.

    I suspected a hardware issue and opened the pc and I noticed that there was an enormous amount of heat.

    The CPU Cooler block was very hot, so after letting it cool down for a while I took it off and the visual inspection made the problem clear:

    008

    There is a very small opening between the fan and the cooler block so it’s really a design issue but nothing the vacuum cleaner can’t fix!

    On a side note: as you can see on the first picture this pc has a nice display on the front that can display time & date, current item in Media Player, e-mail notification and so on.

    I reversed the software that came with the display a couple of years ago so I can put my own things on it. If you are interested in it then let me know!

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  • Move WSUS content folder

    I needed to relocate the WSUS content folder because it was placed on the C Drive (even though there was a 2nd 150 GB Data Partition) to prevent WSUS from filling up the OS Drive.

    Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a GUI option to do that, all Google searches lead to a GUI option for Small Business Server.

    The WSUSUtil tool can do it however, which is located in %ProgramFiles%\Update Services\Tools by default.

    You need to create the targetfolder and then issue:

    The tool will copy, and not move, the files to the new location and update the WSUS settings.

    So don’t forget to manually delete the old folder!

    The current storage location can be found or verified in the registry. It is stored in the ContentDir value in the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Update Services\Server\Setup key.

    See also Verifying WSUS Server Settings (although in incorrectly states the ContentDir value as Content).

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  • Using Synctoy in Data Migrations

    In every project I do I will have to migrate data at some point. This usually involves three types of data:

    • Home Directory Data
    • Workgroup Data (eg office documents)
    • Application Data (not database but flat file data belonging to applications such as templates and documents).

    Home Directory Data is usually a flat copy although I tend to filter out the garbage (temp files and such).

    Workgroup data usually needs to be cleaned up so it involves some kind of data mapping (folder x goes to place y).

    Application Data is usually a flat copy from old to new location but often there are things like ini files that are adjusted and we don’t want to overwrite that.

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  • Saving Password in Office Communicator

    If you want to be able save the password in Office Communicator you must create the key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Communicator or on x64 OS HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator and set the DWORD value SavePassword to 1.

    Now you will have the Save my password checkbox (which will save the encrpted password to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Communicator\AccountPassword

    image

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  • Filed under: General
  • The case of the UPS discovery not working

    I am doing a project involving a Citrix Xenapp environment running on VMWare vSphere.

    The physical machines are powered by two Eaton Uninterruptable Power Supplies that both a network card.

    I received some documentation that describes how to implement automatic shutdown in a VMWare vSphere environment.

    This documentation describes that a vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) must be deployed in which we need to install some software from Eaton.

    I followed the documentation that even described the needed iptables rules needed for their software.

    In the last step a discovery is done and the UPS is supposed to be found. And you have probably guessed by now: it didn’t!

    At first I figured that maybe the iptables configuration was still too tight so I stopped the iptables service but that didn’t help.

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    The case of the Annotations Toolbar

    I got some interesting questions from a user today regarding TIFF images on a Windows 2003 based Citrix environment.

    This user has an application that works with scanned documents and for each document exists both a pdf and a tiff version in the application.

    By default the TIF (and TIFF) file extensions are linked to the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer in Windows 2003.

    The user told me that some time ago she had an extra toolbar where she could perform some extra operations such as making a selection on TIFF images.

    At some point in time this mysterious Toolbar disappeared and she was never able to get it back. She reported this to the helpdesk and the system administrator but they were unable to resolve this.

    I hadn’t hear of this toolbar before but a Google Search led me to this page which explains the toolbar in question which is called the Annotation Toolbar.

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    Self Signing Word Macro’s

    Today I noticed that a recently added Application to the Citrix Test environment added a Macro to the Office Startup directory.

    When a user launches Word he will get a popup because the Template (.dot file) was not signed:

    OfficeMacro

    It would have been a lot easier if Application Vendors sign their stuff because in that case I could have just added the certificate using Group Policy (yesterday’s post describes how to do this).

    Application Vendors usually tell you that you should lower the Macro security in Office (or Word in this case) to Low to get rid of this message. But I think there’s a better solution: we will sign the .dot file ourselves!

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    New Categories

    I added some new Categories to the Blog, something I should have done a long time ago.

    I also tried to add missing Categories to existing posts but I didn’t check all posts ever written so feel free to add a comment to this post if you miss a category or that a certain post is properly categorized.

    The added Categories are:

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  • Filed under: General
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