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Recycle Bin is corrupted on Windows XP

March 16th, 2011. Published under Uncategorized. No Comments.

I fixed this today using a bit of info I found on here. Google-fu will turn up a lot of different suggestions. Even the Kelly’s Korner registry file failed to work for this one. Once we did see the “The Recycle Bin on c:\ is corrupted. Do you want to empty the Recycle Bin for this drive?” error.

Basically, you make sure you have “Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)” UN-checked in Explorer, which you find by clicking Tools -> Folder Options -> View tab from an Explorer window. Then you’ll be able to see the hidden “RECYCLER” folder on the root of each drive.

If you rename the RECYCLER folder on the drive that has a corrupted Recycle Bin, then delete something on that same drive, Windows will create a new RECYCLER folder and the problem will be resolved.

I suggest re-checking “Hide protected operating system files” in Explorer when you are done.

My Computer does not show CD or DVD drive in Windows XP

October 14th, 2010. Published under Uncategorized. No Comments.

I have seen this a few times in recent months, so it is worth documenting. The CD or DVD drive does not show up in My Computer, and in the Device Manager it is showing a warning (yellow circle with black exclamation point in it). The description of the warning states something about the drivers being installed but the device is not present, when the device is most certainly present.

The fix is a registry hack. Be sure to export this key before making deletions, in case things go awry. The key to navigate to is:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

Delete the following values in the right pane.  Note that both values may not exist.

• UpperFilters
  
• LowerFilters

Restart the computer and your drive letter should return.

Outlook AutoComplete cache

July 13th, 2010. Published under Uncategorized. No Comments.

Many times I have been asked about the Outlook address auto complete cache.  This is the way Outlook provides email addresses you have sent or received mail with in the To, CC, or BCC fields in mail messages.  I thought this wasn’t possible in the past.

Not so, apparently.  This cache is stored in the “profilename.nk2″ file, where “profilename” is the name of the Outlook profile.  This file is hidden, so “view hidden files and folders” must be enabled in Windows Explorer.  It resides in the “%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook” folder.  Just copy this over to the new location to bring the autocomplete cache along and remember to rename the file if the destination Outlook profile name is different.

More details for this process can be found in this post at mycomputeraid.com.

CD / DVD drive missing / not recognized by Windows

March 3rd, 2010. Published under Uncategorized. No Comments.

Recently an associate came across this issue, where a Windows XP laptop was not showing a drive letter for the DVD drive. The drive was obviously powered since it would open when the eject button was pressed. In Device Manager, the drive was showing the yellow exclamation point symbol for a device that had a driver issue. The usual action of deleting the device in Device Manager and restarting did not change this; it just came back with the yellow exclamation mark.

Googling for this issue let to several forum posts where the solution was a quick deletion of two values in the registry. The solution, which works for Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7, can be found at the Microsoft Support site.

• Windows XP, Vista, and 7: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060/
• Windows 2000: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/270008/

A quick reboot after the registry deletions fixed the issue on this laptop.

How to access Administrative Shares on Vista (C$)

November 23rd, 2009. Published under Uncategorized. No Comments.

Found this gem recently about turning on the hidden administrative shares in Vista.

Text clipped from http://www.paulspoerry.com/2007/05/09/how-to-access-administrative-shares-on-vista-c/

To enable administrative shares you gotta make a registry change. Click on the orb and in the search box type ‘regedit’ and hit enter. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System. Add a new DWORD called “LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy” and give it a value of 1. Reboot and yer done!

Disable ctfmon.exe in Windows

May 14th, 2009. Published under Uncategorized. No Comments.

Just unchecking the selection for ctfmon.exe in a program like Windows Startup Inspector or Autoruns doesn’t stop it from starting itself up again. Sure, you can block it with Group Policy, but that is a little heavy-handed.

You can disable it in XP by going into the Regional and Language Options in the Control Panel, choose the Languages tab, and click the Details button in the “Text services and input languages section”. In the dialog that pops up, make sure in the “Installed services” section you have only your default keyboard layout. If there are speech services installed, select them and click Remove. Then click the Advanced tab and check the box for “Turn off advanced text services”.

In Vista, go to the Control Panel, and choose “Change keyboard or other input methods” in the “Regional and Language Options” section. On the “Keyboards and Languages” tab, click the “Change keyboards” button. On the “Text Services and Input Languages” dialog, General tab, make sure in the “Installed services” section you have only your default keyboard layout. If there are speech services installed, select them and click Remove. If you find it still running after restarting Vista, you may have to run msconfig and uncheck the ctfmon.exe selection on the Startup tab.