During the past week my Firefox (v16.0) Autocomplete drop down box has had missing text appear when I start typing in the address bar as seen in the screenshot below.
Initially I thought it was Firefox using up too much memory, but the problem occurred on all of my machines even after a recent reboot so some troubleshooting was required.
After restarting Firefox in safe mode (Click the firefox button, choose Help, Restart with add-ons disabled) I confirmed it was a problem with one of my extensions. It took several minutes to disable half the addons and see if the problem continued and then repeat the process until I could work out the offending solution.
It turns out it was the Delicious addon (v3.2.1). Disabling this I have a drop down box with url’s that I can see. The proper behaviour is shown below. The A’s are greyed out as that is the character I typed to start the autocomplete sequence off.
With only this extension enabled I get the problem so it’s not a combination of extensions having problems. I have reported this extension as incompatible.
Powershell 3 was released this week and is now available to download for Windows 7 (sp1) platforms. I tried to install it on my home machine this weekend and got
“The update is not applicable to your computer”. It turns out that this is actually because .net framework 4 (or higher) has not been installed.
The full .net 4 framework package is available at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17718 or you could install the newer 4.5 framework at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30653. Make sure that you close the false powershell installation before attempting the .net installation or the .net will try to install for about 5 minutes on your computer and then complain that another install is already in use and does not give you the option to retry. You can only abort and then run the whole installation again. All in all a pretty bad user experience for trying to install the software.
Thanks to the Troubleshooting guide for the beta version of Powershell 3 that tipped me off for the pre-reqs which are not mentioned on the original download page for Powershell 3 and unfortunately there is no place on that web page to provide feedback.
Whilst doing some troubleshooting work for a client’s group policy settings that were not being applied to a vista machine I launched the Group Policy Management Console (gpmc) and when I went to view the Resultant Set Of Policy (RSOP) of a client machine and when I tried to view the default domain policy I received the message “An error occurred while generating report: An unknown error occurred while the HTML report was being created.” All other group policies appeared fine – it was just the default domain policy – arguably the most important one and not an easy one to restore. My first step was to use a DC that did not have the gpmc installed to use the native group policy tools within the Active Directory Users and Computers snapin. Fortunately this tool worked and I could see the settings…..lots of them.
As I knew the group policy did not seem to be corrupt I then went back into gpmc and attempted a backup of the group policies. All but the default domain policy backed up successfully.
The error message almost looked similar to issues when trying to view web pages on a server with the enhanced ie security enabled but it didn’t really make sense that it was only affecting one group policy.
After a few minutes of digging I found an entry on tek-tips (a site I don’t like to use due to the popups and nag screens) but in this case the answer worked. From Roadki11’s posting on tek-tips.com:-
Cause:
Seems to be something with importing IE security settings.Solution:
Edit install.ins inside: {GUID of Policy}\user\MICROSOFT\IEAK[Security Imports]
ImportSecZones=1Set it back to “0”
Using gpmc I obtained the guid of the policy by right clicking the policy and choosing properties then I connected to c:\WINDOWS\SYSVOL\sysvol\domain\Policies\{guid}\user\Microsoft\ieak
First I made a backup and then edited install.ins, set ImportSecZones to 0 and was then able to edit the policy in gpmc.
Hopefully the background information and the instructions on how to connect to the correct file helps others.
Whilst you are in the gpmc make sure you go down to Group Policy Objects, right click, Backup All, select a location, enter the date and time stamp for the description and back those policies up. Document where the backups are stored so that if you need to restore them they are easily accessible – even on another computer.
I’ve now added the backup to our checkup and system documentation instructions so at a minimum we will have monthly backups of the group policies and a documented location for where this information is kept. In an ideal world, printing off the settings would also be a good way to document the information too.
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.