McFang – Exercising Futility

Posting drivel that is not of interest to anyone.

Posts Tagged WindowsXP

Windows shutdown mindnumbingly slow

Jul 24

Posted by mcfang in Operating Systems | No Comments

It seemed that shutdown in WindowsXP was taking excessively long, with it taking several minutes at the “Saving Your Settings” screen.

Surprisingly(?) I found a tool at Microsoft that provides a solution to get shutdown times back to only a few seconds:
User Profile Hive Cleanup Service

The User Profile Hive Cleanup service helps to ensure user sessions are completely terminated when a user logs off. System processes and applications occasionally maintain connections to registry keys in the user profile after a user logs off. In those cases the user session is prevented from completely ending. This can result in problems when using Roaming User Profiles in a server environment or when using locked profiles as implemented through the Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP.

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Default Interface for Multicast on Windows (IPTV)

May 5

Posted by mcfang in Operating Systems | No Comments

Third time lucky, as the saying goes.

Having given up trying to get IPTV to work twice before I didn’t hold much hope for a third and final attempt. Again I had no luck on my desktop PC, however I fired up a browser on a different PC and to my surprise it worked immediately.

This confirmed that it was not a problem with my router or the ISP. I quickly realised it could be a problem with the routing of multicast packets (required for IPTV, but rarely used otherwise) and as my main PC had dual NICs there could be a configuration issue.

For IPTV to work the default multicast interface must be the same interface that routes to the internet. For some unknown reason WindowsXP had decided to set the default multicast route to the private LAN, despite the fact that the default route for all other packets was the router.

The quick fix is to update the metrics (priorities) for the multicast routes. Do a route print to see the current table, then update each multicast route such that the Internet gateway IP has the lowest metric:

route add 224.0.0.0 MASK 240.0.0.0 <gateway IP> METRIC 10 -p

This will update the metric to “10″ for the given gateway IP, -p means persistent, so it should remain the same after a reboot.

References

Default Interface for Multicast on Windows
How to change the binding order of network adapters in Windows XP and in Windows 2000

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My Documents opens at startup

Dec 24

Posted by mcfang in Operating Systems | No Comments

This was becoming a nuisance, explorer would open a new window every time I logged in (and if I didn’t close them they would continue to compound after each reboot).

A support article suggests a minuscule change in the registry is the cause:

Navigate the Registry to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Win­dows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

Find the value Userinit. This value should read: C:\WINDOWS\system32\userinit.e­xe, including the comma.

Why was the comma missing? Who knows, but at least Windows is somewhat under control now.

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Windows Updates Hate

Dec 10

Posted by mcfang in Operating Systems | No Comments

After “updating” to IE7, shared drives are treated as internet zone – prompting you to confirm every single time you try to copy a file.

This knowledge-base article describes the problem, however the “fix” does not work.

This registry hack appeared to work: 

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains\YOUR_SERVER]
"file"=dword:00000001

Then obviously reboot after update the registry, because Winblows can’t seem to get anything done without a reboot.

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Problems adding SP3 to WindowsXP

Jun 18

Posted by mcfang in Operating Systems | No Comments

I was unable to upgrade WindowsXP to SP3, given an access denied error. It was not hard to find a relevant kb article from Microsoft:
kb949377: When you try to install Windows XP Service Pack, you receive the error message “Access is denied” or “Service Pack installation did not complete”

The only given solution that worked was to reset the registry and the file permissions (as given in the kb article):

cd /d "%ProgramFiles%\Windows Resource Kits\Tools"
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CURRENT_USER /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subdirectories %SystemDrive% /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subdirectories %windir%\*.* /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\repair\secsetup.inf /db secsetup.sdb /verbose

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SP2 cripples Windows XP

Feb 18

Posted by mcfang in Operating Systems | No Comments

SP2 brought with it a rather annoying tweak to the TCP/IP stack: a 10-connection-per-second limit.

I can’t remember exactly what alerted me to this problem, it may have been when a link-checker application stalled, or could have been the multi-threaded ftp client I was using.

Either way, the effect of “hitting the wall” was damned annoying and I need to find a way around it. Thankfully I found an article that offered a few solutions.

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