Vista

DHTML Editing Control removed in IE7+

John Watson — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 18:41:00 GMT

This hasn't seen a lot of circulation (ok, I didn't pay much attention to it) and I was just bitten by it so I wanted to capture the links I found. The symptom is that using Exchange and Outlook Web Access from Vista (beta 2+) will not allow you to compose a new mail message. The DHTML ActiveX control for rich text editing doesn't get downloaded or instantiated.

This was warned about here back in June by B. Ashok on the IE blog. In there he also states "In the near future, we will also killbit the Safe for Scripting control in IE7 in Windows XP so that it will not get instantiated from the browser".

There is a critical patch for Exchange mentioned and linked to in his (her?) blog post which will correct this issue.

Also, I found a white paper on MSDN that talks about this control and ways to work around it. The white paper explains how Vista does not get the control automatically any more but that they are making available an MSI installer which will put it on Vista if you choose to manually install it.

Vista Pre-RC1 (build 5536)

John Watson — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 12:59:00 GMT

Since my Beta 2 was acting very flakey I decided to format the partition and try a newer version. It installed cleanly and came up with no problems. One issue I discovered is that avast! antivirus (free for home use) does not work on build 5536. After installing and rebooting, you'll get a message that Windows Vista has disabled a faulty driver. Hunting around on avast!'s forums I found out that someone claims MS made a mistake in "banning" avast!'s driver and it would be corrected for the RC1 release coming soon.

Vista Beta 2 not a good host for Virtual PC??

John Watson — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 22:36:00 GMT

I posted here how easy it was to get Virtual PC running on Vista. I figured it was a great way to tryout Vista (my office/email/messaging desktop) while still being productive with VMs containing specific development environments. However, after about a week of use, I've decided I'm better off booting into XP to run VMs. I've been experiencing “lockups” of up to 1 minute or more which make effective work impossible. For example, clicking down through directories on the C:\ drive and suddenly Explorer hangs for a while. Sometimes, I'll see the network activity icon going, other times not. If anybody has tips to share, please do!!

My host machine is a Dell Inspiron 6000 760 M (2.0 Ghz) with 2.0 Gb of RAM. The VMs are running from a USB 2.0 attached 5600 RPM drive - I know, 7200 would be better. The images are all VPC 2004 SP1 with up-to-date VM additions updated. The kicker is the same image runs well when I boot into XP and run them there. Given everything identical except the host OS I can only “blame” Vista Beta 2 as the culprit.

Omea Reader under Vista

John Watson — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 11:31:00 GMT

Omea Reader 2.1.1 (free version) installs and runs well under Vista Beta 2. I've discovered one quirk (design flaw?) though. I've set up a separate Data partition to make things easier dual-booting between XP and Vista. So after installing Omea under Vista, I hunted around for the settings on the XP install, found them under C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Local Settings\Application Data\JetBrains\Omea and copied them over to the Data partition (e.g. F:\Omea). When I launch Omea under Vista and go to Tools | Options | Omea | Paths and set the database and log files path to F:\Omea it only accepts the new value for the Log Files. The database setting reverts to the standard Vista location E:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\JetBrains\Omea. Seems like a bug or perhaps a design flaw?

For the record, after exiting Omea and copying over the settings to E:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\JetBrains\Omea, replacing what's there, then restarting you'll find all your feeds, subscriptions, clippings, etc. are there which was a nice thing. Now the problem is remembering which OS I can run Omea in so I don't lose any data!

I wonder if there's a registry or file hack where the value is stored for the database path? Hmmm...

UPDATE: I copied over the contents from the \User location in Vista to my data partition (F:\Omea), updated the registry (HKCU\Software\JetBrains\Omea) values to F:\Omea, moved the folders in the \User location to the Recycle Bin then restarted Omea. Success!

XP/Vista File and folder permissions on shared partition

John Watson — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 21:18:00 GMT

While configuring my computer to dual boot between XP and Vista, I created a “data” partition and moved stuff out of My Documents to the new partition. The plan was to easily see my data in either OS as well as have a clean, simple way to backup. I discovered that I didn't have permissions to the data files from within Vista (the data files were moved to the new partition while booted into XP). I tried taking ownership under Vista but was still restricted from doing so. KB article 308421 mentioned turning off simple file sharing in XP. I tried the same thing in Vista and voila - it worked.

Great non-destructive partitioning utility - and it's free!

John Watson — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 21:01:00 GMT

After testing Vista Beta 2 running inside Virtual PC and then on an older machine, I decided the next step was to take the plunge and setup my main laptop for dual boot. At this point, it “hovered” on my mental to-do list until I saw this article on Lifehacker. What really caught my eye was Gina's mention of a comment posted regarding GParted - an open source partition manager. After reading the article here I headed over to the project workspace and downloaded it. Bottom line - it works as advertised and is a great addition to the toolchest. The ISO is only about 30 Megs and contains a bootable version of Linux. After paying for Partition Magic v3, v4, v5, v6, and v7...I'm done shelling out money for upgrades!

Virtual PC running on Vista host

John Watson — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 16:20:00 GMT

I looked for an answer but few people seem to have posted about this one so I figured I would in case others asked. After trying Vista *inside* a virtual machine, I next wondered if I could install Virtual PC onto a Vista host. After all, running Vista “right on the metal” of a real machine is much sexier than inside an emulated VM :). After a false start of trying to launch the MSI I found a suggestion somewhere that you had to run the Setup.exe stub which worked great. So...when trying older installers, use the Setup and it seems to work well. BTW, Virtual PC 2004 SP1 works well under Vista so migrating over is much easier. You *ARE* using VMs for development, testing, etc. right??? Doing so makes the physical machine irrelevant and recovery from hardware failures much faster.

Windows Vista Beta 2 and missing msvcr71.dll

John Watson — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 16:12:00 GMT

While trying out various things on the Beta 2 (Build 5384) I ran into a missing msvcr71.dll while trying to use Password Safe. Since I was dual booting with XP on another partition, I copied over the file from \Windows\System32 on the XP partition. My super scientific methodology was to try launching again. Next it was msvcp70.dll and then finally msvcp71.dll. After that the application came up fine. Soooo...if you're missing any of these three, grab a copy of them from an XP installation and just simply drop them into \Windows\system32 on the Vista partition. Seems to work okay ;)