bug – Page 2 – Absoblogginlutely!

Exchange 2007 services fail to start on DC (SBS server)

By Andy on Wednesday, February 23, 2011

I’ve had an issue with a new SBS2008 server, running Exchange service pack3 rollup 2 where the information store service does not start after a reboot, especially annoying after the server is rebooting with a scheduled maintenance task. Apparently this issue was fixed in service pack 1, roll up 5 but I’m still getting it 2 service packs and 2 rollups later.

Microsoft have a “fast publish” knowledge base article 940845 and the first solution is to start the services manually – really helpful! Thankfully there are other solutions that involve changing the dependencies of the services to ensure Exchange does not try to start before AD has finished.

One word of warning – using the Microsoft KB to determine the latest service pack or rollup for Exchange 2007 returns Service Pack 3, rollup 1 from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937052. However Rollup 2 has been available since Dec 14th 2010. I’ve put a note on the original kb article but the better way to determine the latest rollup is probably to search for Exchange 2007 service pack 3 rollup

Update Knowledge base 940845 now has a fixit file you can download that will change the dependencies for you along with instructions on how to fix it manually. The article no longer has references to this issue being fixed in previous rollups – probably because this was obviously not the case.

Bugs Exchange / Outlook Patches

Fixed – Archive options missing in Outlook 2007 and send/receive issues

By Andy on Thursday, December 30, 2010

We had a weird issue this morning where the Archive options were missing in Outlook 2007. This is apparently a known issue with the kb2412171 December 14, 2010 outlook update which allegedly improves stability. It is hard to see how removing functionality, breaking send and receive and reducing performance when you switch folders comes under the category of improving stability and increasing performance.
Thankfully the solution is simple, just remove 2412171 from add/remove programs and everything should go back to normal.
Further details on the patch are also available which includes the known issues when installing 2412171.
Needless to say, we have unapproved this patch on our WSUS servers.

Bugs Exchange / Outlook Internet Explorer

Fixed – ‘gtLV’ is null or not an object when replying to an email from OWA

By Andy on Friday, July 2, 2010

I was getting the “‘gtLV’ is null or not an object” message when I replied to an email using our Microsoft Online Hosted Exchange email account. Ironically enough, the problem would always occur when I replied to a new email from a Microsoft support engineer. The email would go through but I would get the ” ‘gtLV’ is null or not an object” error message popup on the screen. If I replied to the email again the problem would not occur. A very similar message can be seen in the Microsoft Exchange Server forums where I also posted the provided solution.

After many emails to the very patient support tech at Microsoft (as I would reply and then send an email to let him know if the reply worked or not) we escalated the ticket and I got back the following resolution.

1. type regedit on command prompt or run
2. go to: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main
3. create TabProcGrowth (string or dword) and set the value to 0

This solution worked for me. From what I can see at the ie8blog this has the side effect of reducing the protectedmode protection and I think the browser tabs use the same process rather than running in seperate processes. This is a slight downside, but I doubt many users will care – they’re more than happy to have OWA working.

Exchange / Outlook

Archive mailbox missing in Outlook 2010 – fixed

By Andy on Sunday, May 2, 2010

If you’re lucky enough to already be running Outlook 2010 and Exchange 2010, then you may have spotted your archive mailbox is missing in the newly released Office2010. There was a bug that is strangely fixed by obtaining a new key from Technet and reentering it from appwiz.cpl, office 2010, change, change product key. I’m not sure why it took so long for the product key to be changed on my machine (about 3 or 4 minutes) but sure enough, after restarting office the mail archive box was back.Thanks to Henrick Walther blog for the heads up.

In my case, there is not a lot in it as we’ve only just switched over to Outlook with Exchange 2010 so there is not a lot of old mail. However I’m already 3/5 of the way through my quota. With no archiving policies set up yet (and office 2007 on the work laptop) the manual housekeeping is going to be a pain.

Bugs Microsoft windows7

Windows 7 Screensaver not kicking in – fixed

By Andy on Friday, February 19, 2010

Had an interesting troubleshooting session this afternoon on a Windows7 pc that was no longer having the screensaver kick in. After checking the screensaver settings were being deployed via group policy, disabling wake on lan and also preventing the network card from waking up the computer/allowing the computer to be shut down, the problem still persisted. Unplugging the wireless mouse (that was a new addition by the user and not the original supplied mouse) didn’t help either. In the end installing the latest intellipoint software and rebooting the machine fixed the problem. Just installing the software didn’t help.

It was nice that Windows7 had automatically found drivers, but it obviously needed the full software installed to work completely.

Subsequently we found a message popping up on the client pc that said the wireless signal strength was low – so it was probably the mouse trying to check in that was making the computer think activity was occurring on the pc.

Bugs Hotfixes Live Communication Server Microsoft

Live Communicator 2005 fails to install – fixed

By Andy on Wednesday, February 10, 2010

I had a client’s LiveCommunicator 2005 stop working and part of the troubleshooting was to remove the software and reinstall. Unfortunately, when I went to reinstall the software, the installation was interrupted and did not complete. No errors were logged in the event log but by looking at the install log file and searching for “return value 3” (standard practise when debugging msi installs) I found the following “ActivateTimeBomb. Return value 3”. A google search only pulled back 3 results, all for Live Communicator which was a good sign, but I did find a posting on the appdeploy forums that offered a solution. I had already applied this patch to the server but had not needed to apply it to the client before, but doing so fixed the problem. The patch file can be found from the kb article 974571 or a direct download.

I was suprised to see how little information was available on google and how useless the install process was. The timebomb information was hidden away in the install log and knowing that “Return Value 3” was the key to a successful troubleshooting session.

AntiVirus Bugs Symantec

Symantec patch now fixes the definitions dated 91231

By Andy on Sunday, January 10, 2010

Yes I deliberately posted the date this way as that is how the shortsighted programmers as Symantec did it. Needless to say, when the year rolled around to 00101 this is a lot less that 91231 so the definitions were treated as old. It scares me to see that this bug managed to get into the product – did they not learn anything from the Y2K issues?

To make matters worse we found some servers were continually downloading definitions onto the server and in one case filled up 73gb of disk space. The fix for this is to ensure that the endpoint protection manager software is running 11.0.5 – this is a new download and upgrade installation although for one of our clients it meant uninstalling and reinstalling every single pc at that location – not an upgrade at all.

To top it all, Symantec also decided this week to announce the end of life for the v10 of their products – the only version that was actually working with correct definition dates. Although end of life is in 2012, support should really have coordinated with sales to ensure that the notice didn’t go out *this* week.

I think I still have a few servers that haven’t updated, so I will be checking those out next week. If we continue to use Symantec (which I really do not want to do), I’m hoping to look at an MSP installation of the product – one server managing all the clients so I only have one place to check for client status (and only one server to install, patch and configure)

windows7

Install Windows7 to vhd notes.

By Andy on Tuesday, July 28, 2009

I’m currently trying an install of Windows7 to a vhd on one of my virtual xp machines (to see if it can be done). I’m thinking that this may be possible but we’ll see.
I’m following the instructions on Keith Comb’s Dual boot VHD blogpost but I did find that calling the vhd file c:\windowsrc7.vhd will cause issues as you cannot have the name starting c:\windows.
I’m hoping this is fixed in the RC (I have a feeling my dvd is the beta but i’m not sure) and certainly in the RTM version.
The whole reason I’m attempting this is to test my idea about truecrypt encryption. As I guessed, it is not possible to do this with Windows7 on a truecrypted drive as it sees the drive as raw. My hope is that by decrypting the drive, installing and then encrypting again it will work – time will tell.

Beta Testing Microsoft

Windows 7 Upgrade advisor ran into a problem

By Andy on Friday, May 8, 2009

I downloaded the Windows 7 upgrade advisor from Microsoft, that is currently in beta on both my work and my home pc to see what the differences were. The work laptop had some warnings but the software fails on the home pc. I get a very unhelpful message of “Windows 7 Upgrade advisor ran into a problem scanning your devices. Upgrade advisor needs to be able to scan your devices to determine if your computer is capable of running Windows 7. Please let us know about this problem.”

Unfortunately there is no UI to send the feedback to Microsoft and there is nothing on the download page either.

Bugs

footnotes in Word

By Andy on Friday, April 28, 2006

If you’ve ever tried to create a footnote in Word and got the daft error message that states “Start At must be between 1 and 16383 for this format.” when the Start At is set to 1 (or 2 or 3 or 4 or …) then the fix is to select the entire document apart from the last paragraph mark (turn the viewing of paragraph marks on by pushing the ¶ button on the toolbar) and then copy paste the document into a new document. Hopefully the document is not that big and that you can copy paste with no problems! Thanks to this post on google groups for the answer

Tag Archives: bug