After a bit of searching it turns out there is a small bug in IIS 7.5 (introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2) which prevents TFS downloading files larger than 2MB over a slow network connection; IIS will expire the idle connection time-out and disconnect mid-transfer.

Installing KB981898 from Microsoft Support will fix this bug and allow TFS builds to run-through without any issues.

-Patrick

Edit*: The beta for CoD WAW has now cloed – however the following information still does apply to some users of the RTM game.

I know this isn’t really related to Microsoft in any way but the public beta for Call of duty World At War has just come out and I am a huge fan. You can download yourself a free copy of the game if you go to http://www.callofduty.com/ and register to get a serial number and a download link.

If you are running a Vista machine you will most likely run into some difficulties when running the game for the first time after installation. These errors are:

-Message box displaying missing d3dx9_37.dll (or something along those lines)
-Message Box displaying: “Error during initialization: Unhandled exception caught”

To remedy these problems do the following:

The Missing DLL file (d3dx9_36.dll) is attributed to an outdated version of Microsoft DirectX. Simply point your browser to here (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2DA43D38-DB71-4C1B-BC6A-9B6652CD92A3&displaylang=en) to download the Microsoft DirectX 9/10 web download application. This will determine the version of DirectX installed on your system and apply the latest SDK updates accordingly.

After this install is complete the error should no longer appear and the game should run fine.

The second error: “Error during initialization: Unhandled exception caught” is a stupid error attributed to the Way the game uses the Windows Vista playback Device.

To remedy this problem click:
Start>Control Panel>Sound

Right Click on the default playback device (e.g. Speakers) and click properties. From there select the Advanced tab.
To eliminate this error the default playback format must be set at 24 bit 48000Hz (Studio Quality). Simply select this from the dropdown list and apply the settings.

Try launching the game now-Everything should run fine.

 Any Questions or comments-don’t hesitate to post them below.

-Patrick (>DDC<Ping)

Edit: Looks like the beta has closed down-we’ll soon see if these errors happen in the full version released in the states today & New Zealand on friday

Edit2: Thanks to xGame (see his comment below):
to any1 having problem with “error during intialization…” in xp go to: control panel->phone and modem options->modems->remove the modem/modems you are not using

“Hello! Starting today, your 30 day trial period beings. By selecting OK you acknowledge that your use of Windows Live services continues to be subject to the Terms of Use and Privacy Statement. Data charges from your mobile operator, including roaming fees may apply for using the Windows Live services. At the conclusion of this trial, you will be given the option to purchase a 30 day pass.”:

Here is what actually happened: Microsoft rolled out a direct-to-consumer billing service for the Windows Live client on Nokia S60′s in the UK and Sweden. The only problem was that not just Nokia S60 users got the message but everyone using the Live Service.

As you may know, we offer Messenger services through mobile operators on lots of handsets, not just Windows Mobile. Traditionally, customers have been billed by their mobile operators for many of these services, either directly or through their data package.- Matt Champagne, director of Windows Live mobile services.

Microsoft are considering adding the “direct-to-consumer billing service” to everyone in the future the finial decision has not been made yet.

So…If you were on a Windows Mobile device and not a Nokia S60 and received the message by accident-ignore it!

As you fast forward through your Windows Media Player library, or have a playlist set to repeat, you may lose a large amount of handles in a short amount of time. This can lead to performance degradation and in some cases, “out of memory” error messages and other unexpected behavior. If you review the Task Manager you may notice that Lsm.exe is consuming a large amount of memory.

This issue only occurs if the following statements are true:

• Your computer utilizes a High Definition Audio Device
• You are running Windows Vista, or Windows Vista 64-bit.
• You are using Windows Media Player 11 to play back audio files.

There is a hotfix available from Microsoft to resolve this issue, however in some cases this may not resolve the issue. The following workaround is a method that I have tested on several systems that exhibit this issue and have found that it does indeed resolve the issue.

• Click on Start, and then click on Control Panel.
• Click on Hardware and Sound.
• Under Sound, click on “Manage audio devices”.
• Select your output device in the list that appears (the default output devices is commonly labelled “Speakers”)
• Right click on the device and from the context menu click on Properties.
• In the “Properties” window, click on the “Enhancements” tab.
• Tick/check the option box for “Disable all enhancements”.
• Click on OK to dismiss the properties window.
• Click on OK to dismiss the “Sound” window.
• Close the Control Panel window by clicking the Close (”X”) button at the top right of the window.

NOTE: You will have to restart your computer in order to reclaim previously lost memory and handles.

This article was posted by MSBLOG’s Kristen Kenny on his personal blog: http://www.canucky.net

This isn’t a hacker exploit. It doesn’t require any tools or utilities whatsoever. Microsoft even documented the Registry key, although obtusely, on its Technet site.

But dishonest PC sellers could use the procedure to install thousands of copies of Vista and sell them to unsuspecting consumers or businesses as legitimately activated copies. This would certainly violate the Vista EULA, but consumers might not realize this until the PCs they bought started demanding activation — and failing — months or years later.

The following describes the Registry key that’s involved.

1. While running a copy of Windows Vista that hasn’t yet been activated, click the Start button, type regedit into the Search box, then press Enter to launch the Registry Editor.
2. Explore down to the following Registry key:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ SL
3. Right-click the Registry key named SkipRearm and click Edit. The default is a DWORD (a double word or 4 bytes) with a hex value of 00000000. Change this value to any positive integer, such as 00000001, save the change, and close the Registry Editor.
4. Start a command prompt with administrative rights. The fastest way to do this is to click the Start button, enter cmd in the Search box, then press Ctrl+Shift+Enter. If you’re asked for a network username and password, provide the ones that log you into your domain. You may be asked to approve a User Account Control prompt and to provide an administrator password.
5. Type one of the following two commands and press Enter:
       slmgr -rearm    or    rundll32 slc.dll,SLReArmWindows
   Either command uses Vista’s built-in Software Licensing Manager (SLMGR) to push the activation deadline out to 30 days after the command is run. Changing SkipRearm from 0 to 1 allows SLMGR to do this an indefinite number of times. Running either command initializes the value of SkipRearm back to 0.
6. Reboot the PC to make the postponement take effect.
7. To extend the activation deadline of Vista indefinitely, repeat steps 1 through 6 as necessary

Read full story and other tricks at source.

The fact of the matter is that many Server 2003 System Admins are in for a surprise when they reboot their servers after 1/12/2007, if they have automated updates enabled.

Why?:
On that date Microsoft pushed a critical patch KB929969.  The patch did not require a reboot, so your system will work fine for days, weeks or even months, but once you reboot…well lets just get into the symptoms:

Your first clue is that your Manage My Server screen will not work and you will get a Script Error complaining about the mys.dll/mys.hta.

Any attempt to open Computer Management, Enterprise Management, DeviceManagement…etc… will result in an error saying that mmc cannot find the *.msc file.

IIS and SQL server will fail.  Any time you hit Cntl F or Search, it will fail.

So what did this patch do to your server?  It removed a file. C:\Windows\System32\msxml3.dll was replaced by msxml4.dll, but this file doesn’t replace the msxml3.dll file effectively.

So what can we do to resolve the problem?:

Resolution:

Break out your Install CD and extract the following two files:

\i386\msxml3.dl_
\i386\msxml3r.dl_

from a DOS prompt you will need to expand these files and install them
in the system32 directory

c:> expand -r msxml3.dl_ c:\Windows\system32
c:> expand -r msxml3r.dl_ c:\Windows\system32

Then you need to register the msxml3.dll file

c:> regsvr32 c:\Windows\system32\msxml3.dll

Reboot the system and your server should be fine.
It seems like this Update from Microsoft has caused System admins all around the world nothing bug problems. But until this update is less buggy it looks as though a lot of servers will remain MS07-004 unpatched.

-Although-the article states that the patch causes all sorts of confusion on a Windows Server (due to msxml3.dll being replaced) it seems that the patch has nothing to do with MS XML only VML [Vector Markup Language] (as shown in C:\WINDOWS\$NtUninstallKB929969$)

So either bpacman is wrong about msxml3.dll being replaced along with the VML update or right I didn’t do enough research-sorry

-Patrick

The proof-of-concept code targets the CSRSS (Client/Server Runtime Server Subsystem) the part of windows that launches and closes applications, the exploit affects all versions of Windows including the (un)released Windows Vista.
Tested on XP Service Pack 2 the proof-of-concept will cause the computer to crash resulting in a system lockup, system failure (Blue Screen of Death), or simple hard reboot.

Microsoft SRC said today “Initial indications are that in order for the attack to be successful, the attacker must already have authenticated access to the target system. Of course these are preliminary findings and we have activated our emergency response process involving a multitude of folks who are investigating the issue in depth to determine the full scope and potential impact to Microsoft’s customers.”

This is good news for users, as a patch is coming. The potential for attack, rated less critical by Secunia is still problematic if the system is infected by rootkits, or applications designed to allow remote access to a PC. The method of attack, and the way this exploit works, means there is no real protection for end users, other than to ensure you are fully patched, and your malware, spyware, and virus scanning software is running and up to date.

Info Sourced from monstersandcritics.com

 Windows Vista RTM
 I open up Messenger, click to go to my inbox and once it loads up I see “Office Live Mail”
 and Office Live related advertisements splattered everywhere. Using a @live.com email
 address, in this instance is  and I’m using Windows Vista RTM.

 Windows XP Media Center Edition
 I sign into Messenger again and once again I go into my inbox. This time it appears that
 Windows Live Mail (as it’s currently branded) has released to web as there aren’t any
 beta tags, and it’s given me premium services such as no advertisements. I’m using the
 same  account except I’m using a different machine.

What?! I don’t get it – the same account, logging in from two different computers and two different operating systems but from the same network. Anyone got any ideas? Is Windows Live Mail readying for release? (it’s not by the way, but before Christmas definately) Shall I complain that my advertisements have disappeared? (I won’t by the way!)

It’s all very confusing – check your Windows Live Mail accounts – please comment on what you see and if anything’s changed, and if you’ve seen this sort of thing happening before. Thanks

Although this dosen’t change my perspective on Vista being a really great operating system-finding a bug at the last minute does put a damper on its credibility….hopefully that’s the only hiccup and Vista will be the very best Operating System out there today.

Take a look around and see what you think. After you sign in, click the “Manage My Profile” link at the bottom and fill out your profile data in order to be able to submit feedback. Keep in mind that this is a beta site, so the feedback isn’t going to be processed or resolved. Don’t enter your real bugs here- or do, but enter them on the real Connect site as well!

 After you’ve taken a look around, if you have any comments you can file a feedback or suggestion form on the main Connect site at http://connect.microsoft.com/Connect/Feedback.

A couple of notes about the beta site; some issues were found after the deployment to the beta site and have already been resolved internally.

• File uploads may not work correctly with Firefox 1.5. This is known and has been corrected in a later internal build.
• Feedback should work with both Opera and Firefox, although some display elements may not be correctly placed or visible in non-IE browsers. These issues have been largely eliminated in our internal builds.
• After attaching files, you may notice that the “attached files count” on the Feedback Details page always remains 0. This has been corrected in our latest builds.

Source straight from The Feedback Loop

OK so the title may be slightly misleading, but this is strange:

1) Go to Google.com
2) Type in search then hit I’m Feeling Lucky
3) Have a guess at what comes up.

I find this rather strange because Google and Microsoft are like raaawwrrrr at each other because of sibling rivalry (unlike Apple which is most certainly the black sheep in the family, like the uncle we don’t talk about because he likes wearing women’s dresses and lederhosen for example). But then something like this comes about – I dredd to think what the PageRank is for Windows Live Search… if anyone wants to tell me what it is so I don’t have to bare the agony of installing Google Toolbar for my precious Internet Explorer 7, I’d appreciate it.

1. Here are the specific steps that can be taken now to fix this issue on any affected system that isn’t genuine:
   Delete the data.dat file from C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Windows Genuine Advantage\data (The drive letter will depend on where the OS was installed)
2. Revisit http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/downloads/validate.aspx to confirm whether the machine is genuine.
3. Run wgatray.exe /b from the command line to ensure that the latest validation is updated for WGA Notifications.  This command may be absent from the user’s machine and should not be considered an error.  Please ensure that this is run as an Administrator.  A reboot may be required to remove all non-genuine notifications.

The team have also implemented a webpage with special instructions that will receive any traffic from systems that are running on product keys that could have been affected by this issue.

A KB Article has been written to further point the steps to take inorder to fix the problem.

If you check out the Microsoft Online Crash Analysis (ID: 1501) then it explains basically what happens. As most of you know, the “Generic Host Process for Win32 Services” is “svchost.exe” in Task Manager. You’ll see that there’s usually at least 5 or 6 of them in Task Manager and it’s a very important service because it hosts other services and handles all the processes from DLL files – basically it’s a very important service and should never really be messed with unless you really know what you’re doing.

I sometimes turn my machine on and it’ll give me an error report saying that the “Generic Host Process for Win32 Services had to close” and it’ll let me report it. After I do so, it’ll take me to the Online Crash Analysis site as given above. Now this has only seemed to have happened on my laptop but on 5 different sets of operating systems and/or re-installations, and the problem only seems to come about after I install all the updates that it gives me. I’ve got Windows XP Media Center 2005 installed at the moment with all the updates, and it still happens. Is it just my laptop, or is it actually an automatic update which starts screwing things up?

There’s a fix available for this problem and it says that it’s a problem that happens when you install the update MS05-012, however it doesn’t freakin’ work! I’m really stumped to be honest – has anyone else got this error or seen it before? Has anyone got any information? Why the hell isn’t Microsoft doing something about it? Here’s my system information here and obviously take out the “sensitive” data – if anyone wants to look at it, feel free and let me know if anyone’s got any ideas.

Update by Jabez: According to a comment left by RRasco, the fix #2 from http://www.sizlopedia.com/2007/04/28/fix-generic-host-for-win32-process-error/ worked for him. Give it a shot!

EVENT LOG Application
EVENT TYPE Warning
SOURCE SRMSVC
EVENT ID 12317
COMPUTERNAME   SERVER2
TIME 5/1/2006 12:15:45 PM
MESSAGE File Server Resource Manager failed to enumerate share paths or DFS paths. Mappings from local file paths to share and DFS paths may be incomplete or temporarily unavailable. FSRM will retry the operation at a later time.
Error-specific details:
Error: (0x80070005) Access is denied.

Although this event doesn’t affect quota functionality, the fact that it occurs hourly has prompted numerous support calls from customers. We’ve isolated the cause and the solution for this event…well, most of the cause anyway.

An Event 12317 showing access denied is caused when the NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users group is not a member of the BUILTIN\Users group in the domain. (As you might know, the local BUILTIN\Users group on a domain controller is mapped to the domain built-in group Users. Therefore, the effect of removing NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users from the BUILTIN\Users group on a domain controller has a domain-wide effect.) 

Why does this cause the event error? Because the DFS RPC endpoint is configured to allow both BUILTIN\Administrators access and BUILTIN\Users access, the latter of which is assumed to contain NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users (the default setting). Without NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users in the mix, the NetDfsEnum API fails to enumerate the domain-based roots because the FSRM service is authenticating with that identity. The resulting ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED error causes the event to fire.

What we haven’t solved is why NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users would be removed from the BUILTIN\Users group. We’ve looked for Active Directory guidance indicating this is a best practice, but we couldn’t find any. We suspect that admins might intentionally remove this group in an attempt to increase security.

So, to resolve this event, add NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users to BUILTIN\Users group on the PDC emulator. You can check this by launching Active Directory Users and Computers and looking in the Builtin folder for the domain. The Users group must contain the Authenticated Users group. If it does not, you can add it using the snap-in. Next, stop and restart the FSRM-related services (srmreports and srmsvc) on the file servers where FSRM is running.

If you were one of the 39 people requesting updates on the article that Jabez posted a while back i will alert you ASAP with links to this article and the one at the File Cab.
Hope the information helps-All credit is to the guys at the Filing Cabnit Blog

If you are trying to install Windows Vista RC1 in VMWare Workstation, you may see setup appear to hang on the text-mode screen that says “Windows is loading files…”.

Actually what has happened is that Vista Setup is already in graphics mode trying to do things, but something about the way it switches the display adapter into graphics mode is not working right on VMWare.

Since Microsoft makes a competitive product, Virtual PC, this is funny that they come out with a major new test release(Windows Vista RC1) that just not work on VMWare Workstation. Or Product team did not test this product with VMWare Workstation? But in my memory, I can recall that Microsoft also using VMWare Workstation before Microsoft has bought VirtualPC.

After researching, I found that there is a workaround, for now, while VMWare works on the problem. Before you install Windows Vista RC1 to VMWare Workstation, you may edit the virtual machine’s .vmx to include the following,

svga.maxWidth = “640″
svga.maxHeight = “480″

You can get Vista installed in VGA 16 color 640×480 mode (it will look awful) and then when you get everything running, install VMWare tools and take out those two lines and you’ll be good to go.

An Indian discovered that nobody can create a FOLDER anywhere on the computer which can be named as a port on your computer (such as CON, LPT1 etc etc.)
This also works when you try to create a file called “CON”, or “CON.”. “.CON” shows up the way it should. It’s comes back from the DOS days.

Thus the following wont work: CON, AUX, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, PRN or NUL.
Give it a try if you want-I have not tested it on vista but I suspect it won’t work either Confirmed…Works on vista (thanks Jordan)

Another Useless fact from me

As expected (well, duhhh) there are/were/will be teething problems. Those who can sign in, don’t sign out. Those who can’t send messages to a particular person, close the window then open again and for some reason this seems to help. If you can’t sign in, use the MSN Web Messenger which should still work.

Other things might arise – such as not being able to use certain features, and some contacts (except Mobile contacts) may not appear online, and those who are currently still talking to you may appear to be offline. Although there isn’t a time set on when this will be fixed, it should be sorted within the next few hours of this post, so by about 11pm British Summertime, and yeh, it’s a worldwide issue

To demonstrate this easier, I’ve mocked up the following concept design:

Update news from Live.com Team, they found a new bug in IE6 when IE doing the Image Filtering.
Details here,

————————————————————————————————

We have recently released a workaround for a bug in IE6 where image filters for PNG can cause a hang on the Live.com site. This IE bug is already fixed in IE7, but we still needed to workaround it to make sure the site works properly for IE6.

To understand the problem, here is an explanation from the IE team (thanks Peter Gurevich!):

• Each IE 6 window is a UI thread. 
• The HTML page and any script you written for the page run in the UI thread.  Therefore filters in your page or in script will download on the UI thread
• IE’s implementation of the AlphaImageLoader filter downloads images synchronously 
• Synchronous loading of an image or successive images on the UI thread has the potential to hang the browser and adversely affect the user experience.

Our workaround is to stop applying transparent image filters to PNG. As a result, your transparent PNG will not look as great as it used to. I would encourage you to change to using transparent GIF moving forward.Sorry for the inconvenience – the SDK will be updated with this new info in our next release.

Thanks!
James Lau
Program Manager
Live.com Team

You have Windows Server 2003 SP1 as your primary domain controller. IT department has purchased Windows Server 2003 R2 and wants to setup as a member server.

But when you pop in the 64bit R2 CD into the CD-drive of the Primary Controller (Windows Server 2003 SP1), you will receive an error: ”The image file for adprep is valid, but it is for a machine type other than the current machine.”

Cause:

The ADPREP folder in the 64bit R2 CD doesn’t have the 32bit binaries, thus you are unable to do a ADPREP using the 64-bit R2 CD on a 32-bit Domain Controller. This goes the same when you have a 32-bit R2 CD and trying to upgrade the schema on a 64-bit Domain Controller.

Resolution:

Microsoft is working on a fix.

Please leave a comment here to be notified when there’s a resolution/fix/workaround.

Update 1: MS has a fix for this. To receive the fix, please contact Microsoft PSS and request for Hotfix 919151. Microsoft PSS: http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/20150/20150.html

Note: No $ will be charged for hotfix request from Microsoft PSS.