Remko Weijnen's Blog (Remko's Blog)

About Virtualization, VDI, SBC, Application Compatibility and anything else I feel like

Archive for the ‘Vista’ Category

Today I was troubleshooting a warning message that popped up when launching a network application with RES Workspace Manager:

The publisher could not be verified. Are you sure you want to run this software?

Usually this is a simple fix: add the servername (file://server) to the Local Intranet zone:

You can add and remove websites from this zone. All websites in this zone will use the zone's security settings.

That worked when I launched the application directly. However when launching the application with RES Workspace Manager I would still get the warning. Even stranger: when I clicked Cancel the application would still be launched.

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My Network Places Internals

Nethood IconI am using a PowerShell script to copy some elements of from the users old profile location to a new location. This includes the Nethood ("My Network Places") folder which contains the Network Places shortcuts.

A user reported that she could not save documents to Network Places anymore and after inspection the Network Places shortcuts were broken.

I started comparing the old Nethood folder to the new and observed the following difference in Explorer:

image

When copying entries from the Nethood folder with Explorer manually they worked fine, so somehow Explorer gives the Nethood folder special treatment.

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Switching to the Services Session

Just read a tweet from @andyjmorgan about Interactive Service Detection. This made me remember that it’s possible to switch to the Session 0 with an undocumented api in winsta.dll.

For this API to work you must have the Interactive Services Detection (UI0Detect) service running.

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Remote Registry from 32 to 64 bit

imageYesterday I needed to set a few registry keys remotely from a 32 bit windows machine to a 64 bit machine.

I used reg.exe to set the key but even though it returned success the key wasn’t altered.

As I suspected the key was written to the Wow6432Node. In the help I couldn’t find any switch to force reg.exe to use the 64-bit view.

On a 64 bit machine this is not a problem since both 32- and 64 bit versions of reg.exe exists. The 32 bit version of reg.exe defaults to the 32 bit view and the 64 bit version defaults to the 64 bit view.

But luckily reg.exe has a switch (that is not listed in the help) to force the View:

Logon SIDToday I was reusing some old (pre vista) code the retrieves the Logon SID that I wrote a few years ago. The Logon SID is a special SID that identifies a logon session that has the form S-1-5-5-X-Y.

You can view your Logon SID with Process Explorer, right click a GUI process, select Properties and goto the Security Tab:

Process Explorer|Security Tab|Logon SID

 

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The GetTokenInformation function can be used with the TokenLinkedToken Information Class on Windows Vista and higher to the linked (Elevated) token.

This is useful when User Account Control is enabled and you want to launch an elevated process e.g. from a service.

This example code fails however when User Account Control is disabled:

GetLastError() returns 1312 which is defined in winerror.h as ERROR_NO_SUCH_LOGON_SESSION with description “A specified logon session does not exist. It may already have been terminated.”

So you should check if User Account Control is enabled in such cases (or make this error non critical).

Snippet below can be used to programmatically determine if User Account Control is enabled:

SasLibEx Screencast

I just recorded a SasLibEx Screencast, it shows some of the very powerfull features of SasLibEx.

The following features are shown:

  • Simulate Ctrl Alt Del (Secure Attention Sequence)
  • Cancel Ctrl Alt Del
  • Lock Workstation
  • Unlock Workstation (without credentials)
  • Disable Ctrl Alt Del
  • Enable Ctrl Alt Del again
  • Cancel pending UAC request
  • Is Desktop Locked
SasLibEx Feature Demo #1

Have you developed an application that accesses files and may stop because a file cannot be accessed but you need to?

Since Windows Vista it is possible to find out the name of the application which holds open a file.

And we have created a solution for you that doesn’t require a driver, nor does it need Administrator rights! Just plain user source code for you to use instantly.

We have developed a solution in Delphi that can show your user which application stalls your application. Look at these screenshots:

In fact, these dialogs are only for demonstration purposes. But you can get them in addition as a Delphi project!

The code itself is fairly easy to use. We have developed an extension to the official IFileIsInUse Interface from Microsoft.

All you have to do it to call this function provides by us:

The name of the app is returned by the method GetAppName. And if the other application supports IFileIsInUse (call method GetCapabilities) interface you even can close the file or switch to the window.

You’ll see how it works in the demonstration project (images above) accompanied by the function GetFileInUseInfo.

Currently, we only offer a Delphi solution. C++ may available in future or when there’s enough demand for it.

Please use the Contact Form to get more information about how to obtain the solution and conditions.

I was cleaning up some old data on my Hard Drive when I found a program I wrote about a year ago.

At that time I was doing a project where I was deploying a Windows 2008 based Citrix Environment.

I wanted to get rid of the new Personal Folders or User’s files icon on the Desktop and replace it with the familiar My Documents icon.

Personal

These settings are stored in the Registry under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{folder’s GUID}\ShellFolder.

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