Belfry Images

At Movieworld there’s a Tux Racer arcade game! Pictures after the fold!

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If you can’t get your contact list coming up in Outlook, here’s a how-to that works well. Two things to look out for are Outlook not closing properly (it may run as a notification button, open Task Manager and kill the Outlook process off just to make sure) which seems to stop the fix from working, and the fact that right-clicking on the Outlook icon to get to mail settings doesn’t work if the Outlook icon is a shortcut (ie 99% of the time). To get into mail settings, open Control Panel then Mail once Outlook is shut down.

I was trying to get security impersonation working in an ASP.NET app so that database access would work correctly. For reference, to impersonate a user, add this to the web.config file:

The password is stored in plain text format, this is a bit scary but that looks like the way to do it. There must also be a way of using IIS to do the impersonation but I couldn’t get that up.

Now that the app is impersonating the MyDatabaseUser account, it no longer has access rights to the temporary ASP.NET folder. This gives a yellow screen of death with the following error:

Access to the path "C:\\Windows\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v1.1.4322\\Temporary ASP.NET Files\\MyApplication\\XXXX\\XXXX\\hash.web" is denied.

To resolve this, the account needs to be given write permission to the temporary folder. Browse to "C:\[windows]\Microsoft.NET\Framework\[.net version]", open properties for the Temporary ASP.NET Files folder and go the Security tab. Add your database user account and give it the same permissions as the NETWORK SERVICE user (full control). Once this is applied the user (and therefore the application) will have access to the temporary folder root. Now you can move on to the next YSOD.

I just had a spanking new Dell start crashing. svchost.exe kept giving an application error on bootup:

svchost.exe … the instruction at “0x???” … the memory could not be ‘read’

In the application log & finding the error report for svchost.exe it reports that msi.exe (the Windows installer) was faulting.

This is an issue with an automatic update breaking the Windows installer. There is an update available from microsoft (I think it’s this one) but the page I found (Tech Blender: Windows Update Broke My Machine (svchost.exe — application error), and How to Fix It) gives a solution that works:

1. Turn off automatic updates (right-click on My Computer & go to the Automatic Updates tab)
2. Reset the computer
3. Go to Windows Update (in the Start menu or go to update.microsoft.com), use Express Updates and install the fix
4. Reset your computer again once the update is installed

From the looks the machine is working now. Thanks, Microsoft

I managed to switch my motherboard _and_ my video card the other day, and keep the same installation of Windows going. I had to do a repair install, which was very tricky, using an original XP disk with an SP2 installation. So I went from SP2 back to vanilla XP with the repair install, installed drivers for absolutely everything, upgraded back up to SP2, installed DirectX 9, and then crashed every 30 seconds until I disabled most of AGP. So that was enough to keep programming (and kick myself for swapping motherboards). But now it crashes every time I try to do something fancy, like opening Azureus, WinAMP, or any other program that uses sound or tries to initialise DirectX.

And the entire reason for the upgrade was to get DX9 so I can check out XNA.

Well I’ve finished my current project for now, made my backups, and am about to reformat. I may even make a partition and install Linux. See you on the other side. If I don’t come back, bury me with my guitars.

Microsoft has released a service pack for VS2005 under Windows Vista, so maybe I can consider Vista when I eventually upgrade my poor Athlon XP 1600+. Now I just have to get over having to go through twice as many screens to use advanced settings, mess around with an over-simplified explorer interface, buy an enormous screen to make room for the Aero Glass widgets, wait for minutes to delete a file, and the fifteen billion other annoyances that I picked up with Vista after playing for 5 minutes. Easy.