Tips & Tricks

If you are not too thrilled with the Windows Vista/7 shutdown menus or just want the convenience of having those options on your desktop it’s pretty simple to do.

When you try to right click a network connection in the Network Connections folder in Windows XP and select Properties, you get an error message that says "an unexpected error occurred". Not very descriptive, so what is the problem?  The most common cause of this problem is damaged registry settings that prevent you from viewing the network connection’s properties.

I ran into an interesting problem recently with a client who was trying to upload a file for a Live Meeting in which she was the presenter. Her presentation was created in Power Point 2007 and had the extension .pptx. When she attempted to upload the file to Live Meeting she was prompted to install an ActiveX control to convert the .pptx file to a Live Meeting (.lmp) file. The problem came when installing the ActiveX file, when she clicked on the link to install the ActiveX file, the process started but then would come back with an error saying that the ActiveX control could not be installed.

A client of mine had this issue recently. When you try to start a program with administrative privileges in Windows XP by using the Runas command, the program window opens but it’s empty. This happens because of an issue with permissions. There is a fairly simple workaround for the problem.

I ran across this gem recently when I had some folders in Explorer that were set up to show in the Details view, but some worked and some did not. What I found out is by default, Explorer in Windows XP will remember the customization settings for up to 400 folders. When you exceed that limit, it will no longer retain the settings. There are a couple of ways you can fix this issue…