THE

LIST

This newsletter tracks new information, and improvements in existing information, on the Windows Support Center, my Web site supporting Windows desktop systems and leading application software. I also include small, useful items that might not find a permanent place on the site, but that I would like to pass along, and anything else I feel like writing!

Click here to subscribe. If you subscribe, you will receive email notification when there is a new issue of the newsletter. (You will not receive the newsletter itself by email. That’s why I call it low-tech.) My intention is to provide a new and further way to serve the one million people per month who visit my site. Previous newsletters are available online, and their content searchable through this site’s search engine. Enjoy! — Jim Eshelman

CONTENTS of this Issue

1. NEWS & VIEWS
2. TIPS
3. WINDOWS SUPPORT SITES
4. MY FAVORITE FREEWARE
   
   MS KNOWLEDGE BASE Articles:
5. Commands, Utilities & Files
6. Windows Registry
7. Shutdown & Restart
8. Startup & Boot Log

TIPS

DARNIT! DARNIT! DARNIT! THAT DARN NEWDOTNET!

Have you run into NEWDOTNET (New.net) yet? This e-malady is being taken seriously enough that, if I were to send this newsletter to you by email, it just might be blocked from delivery simply because I used the word. In fact, several times a week, somebody writes to one of the microsoft.public newsgroups asking for help with this problem, and they are always answered. But you can’t find the answers. They vanish almost as fast as they are posted. It seems that some automated process (robot) is removing them as containing potentially dangerous content, just because they contain the words of the NEWDOTNET error message!

So, in helping people out, we’ve had to get sneaky. We have to answer the inquiry without naming the problem. One of the sneakiest has been MS-MVP Sandi Hardmeier, who added instructions for solving NEWDOTNET issues to her Bugs, Glitches & Stuff-Ups page (which was The E-List’s Site of the Week for Issue No. 15. Sandi has a sub-page called Darnit! (which, knowing how very domesticated Sandi is, was surely named after her tendency to sit around repairing socks all day). (NOTE: If you see no future issues of The E-List, it will be because I did not duck and run for cover fast enough after that last remark. Actually, she sews tapestries.)

New.dot (like the companion menace SaveNow) is spyware, a commercially motivated variety of malware that not only covertly spies on your online habits for someone, it also tends to get in the way of your computer working right. Have you downloaded anything from MP3.com lately? If so, you probably have New.dot installed on your computer. Ditto if you’ve visited Go!Zilla, BearShare, iMesh, Babylon, Cydoor, and others. The simplest solution is to download and run Ad-Aware to make sure your system is clean of these little buggers. Check out the information on Sandi’s page for more information and more advice.

ADVANCED SITE SEARCH

A lot more of you are using the Windows Support Center Site Search a lot more. It will surely never make the Top 10 most popular pages on the site, but it’s definitely in the Top 20. You can get there from almost any page on the site — by clicking “Search” on the front page, or on the navigation bar at the top of almost every other page. It occurred to me that this would be a good time to tell you about some of its more advanced features, and also mention a couple of sneaky little things I’ve been doing to help you over some minor inconveniences in the way the Site Search works.

SEARCH TIP No. 1. Try the Advanced Web Search. You can find this link right under the Search box on the Site Search page, or by clicking here. Now, as Advanced Search features go, these are pretty basic. (What I consider the real advanced search options come in Search Tip No. 2, below.) All this adds is the ability to choose whether the search finds pages with all words you give it, or pages with content matching any word you give it. Sometimes, though, that’s exactly the difference you want.

SEARCH TIP No. 2. Consult the Search Tips. These are the real “advanced search” options. On every search results page, you’ll see a “search tips” link near the bottom and near the top. You can also read these tips here. What you will find there are both * and ? wildcards (word completion and single character, respectively), a + (plus) prepending to a word that forces the word to be present and — here’s one to crow about — a - (minus) prepending a word to force the word not to be present on a page. This is a very rare feature — I’ve been trying to persuade Microsoft to add an exclusionary search term to its GUI filefind for the last three OS versions, and I doubt we’ll see it anytime soon. But it does happen to be available in the WSC Site Search provided by FreeFind.

SEARCH TIP No. 3. Priority of Results. This is more of an observation, and one of the first things that really impressed me about this search tool. It’s smart. There is a very high probability that the page you want will be earlier on the results list, rather than later. There’s no guarantee of this, of course; but the number of times that the first page produced was exactly what I wanted surprises me.

SEARCH TIP No. 4. Refreshing the Page. This is (what I hope is) a helpful little feature I’ve been adding to all the pages. Because of the frame structure of the pages on this site, what the Site Search really pulls is the main page text body. For example, if it is sending you to the Hardware, Drivers & RAM page, it won’t send you to http://aumha.org/win4/kbhrdwar.htm. Rather, it will send you to the slightly different http://aumha.org/win4/kbhrdwar.php page, which has the actual text that was searched. This is fine unless, of course, you wanted to use some of the navigation features and other information features that are in the other frames. To cover this exigency, I built hidden aid into the page’s headline. Near the top, you will notice a link on the word ‘here’ in the phrase “In IE, hold mouse here for list of most recent changes.” The original purpose of that link was simply to display the “tooltip” information box when you point to it; but to make it visible as a link, I had to tell it to point somewhere. Where I decided to have it point was to the page you’re on (in case it was accidentally clicked, you wouldn’t go anyplace). Finally, I tweaked it just a bit more, and made it so that it would not only keep you on the page you’re on, it would also display the top and left navigation frames. So, if the Site Search drops you on a page without navigation frames (it always will), most of the time you can click that word ‘here’ and have them appear. (Try it.)

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WINDOWS SUPPORT SITES

E-LIST FEATURED SITE:
AXCEL216’s MAX SPEED by Axcel216

For a long time, I’ve had a link on my Windows Support Sites page to the MS-DOS 5.00-7.10 Undocumented, Secret & Hidden Features page on the above site, calling it, “Possibly the best thing on AOL!” And I mean it! That one page is worthy of that level of praise. But it’s only one page out of a really extraordinary site, and the whole site is worth knowing about.

What’s on it? Oh, just about everything. Axcel has been accumulating tips and tricks and notes and hints and how-tos and all sorts of other help onto this page for years! The biggest problem with it is that it’s so darn big that one is tempted to turn tail and run rather than try to dig through it all. But it’s worth the dig. Most of this stuff is quite decent, and some of it is really good! (Better yet, I can’t, off hand, remember a single piece of bad advice that I’ve run into on the site... not that I’ve come close to reading the entire 100+ pages of a thousand or more tips.) Axcel lives up to the site’s motto, “Serving strictly the BEST tweaks to over 4 million readers since 1993!” (And I bet that number is a bit outdated, d’ya think?)

Just go to his front page (linked above) and read its description. That will tell you pretty much everything you need to know about the site. Every MS operating system from DOS 5 to Windows XP can be found there, it’s easy enough to find your way around if you start at the beginning, and yes, he has a search engine! (Ha! He uses the same one I do, FreeFind!)

Registry hacks, Windows tweaks and tips and tricks, DOS secrets, Easter eggs, freebies, games... and lots more. Plenty to keep you entertained and informed for quite a while.

OTHER SUPPORT SITES

KBaseOnline
KBaseOnline is a different type of support page by Kevin Saitta of NVision Consulting, Inc., and it has a lot of useful, interesting stuff, including articles, tutorials, and tips on a wide range of topics interesting to IT professionals. Just to name a few: VB, Javascript, SQL and other databases, programming, and Web administration. Kevin is continually expanding it and, in fact, a couple of my articles from the Windows Support Center may appear there one of these days. (I just have to answer his email! One of these issues, I’ll give you a full report on my email calamities of these past few weeks but, hopefully, not until they’re over!) KBase has serious, intelligent information that you may find more than a little enjoyable.

Windows XP Mania
Paul Chandler has offered an attractive and informative site on Windows XP. Plenty of practical stuff, and plenty of fun stuff. Personally, I find his page transitions tedious (especially on a modest dial-up connection) but, even with that, I have to admit they are pretty cool-looking! (And I had to get picky to find something I didn’t like. The site’s good!) Oh, if you notice a familiar-looking WSC logo sitting around on his page, and a Windows XP shutdown and restart troubleshooting article you think you’ve read somewhere before... yes, Paul was most gracious and actually asked before adding them to his site. How much do I like this site? Well, it’s the first Win XP site that I plan to recommend (to the Microsoft powers-that-be) that it be added it to the Win XP Expert Zone page of quality Windows XP Related Communities.

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MY FAVORITE FREEWARE

REGISTRY BACKUP & OPTIMIZATION FOR WINDOWS 2000 & XP

Windows 95 came with a terrific Registry backup utility called ERU, the Emergency Recovery Utility. It works in Win98 also. Win98 and Win ME came with the versatile ScanReg utility which not only handled various Registry-checking features at Windows startup, but also allowed for manual backing up of the Registry (and other startup files) whenever you wanted. In many cases, these are the life-savers of Windows Registry management! Prudent counsel is unanimous: Never make changes to your Windows Registry without first backing it up!

Unfortunately, Windows XP didn’t come with a tool for Registry backup.

Oh, there are native tools that can be used in a pinch. For example, System Restore is the most useful fallback. Though a bit of overkill, you can set a manual Restore Point right before doing any serious work on your system. (But you can’t use it to backup just the registry — you get all sorts of other stuff, too. And you can’t use it to recover and restore a Registry when booting from a boot floppy, in case something really wrong.) You can also use RegEdit to export the entire Registry, but that isn’t something the typical user might do. (Typical users are usually best off being kept away from RegEdit! Besides, the export is at least twice the size it needs to be unless you take an extra step or two.) Also, the Windows XP backup utility, NTBackup, will back up the Registry for you. But, again, this is highly inefficient and a bit of overkill — it takes about five times as long to load NTBackup and tell it what to do as it should take to back up the entire Registry.

Furthermore, ScanReg had other features, including the ability to optimize a Registry that had gotten inefficiently organized over time. (The Registry is just a data base. Sometimes you have to compress your data file.) A lot of people found that this helped them keep their systems running more efficiently. But Windows XP doesn’t come with a native tool to optimize the Registry, and there wasn’t any other in sight.

Enter programmer Lars Hederer. Lars was already on my “favorite people in the world” list for having written CabPack several years ago — a freeware utility to create .CAB files (generally more efficient than .ZIP files). Now he’s come out with two utilities that should earn him the gratitude of large numbers of Win XP users everywhere. ERUNT is an NT-based version of ERU for backing up the Registry. NTRegOpt is an NT-based Registry optimizer. Both of them work in Windows NT, 2000, and XP. Both of them can be downloaded from the My Favorite Freeware page.

ON REGCLEAN & DINOSAURS...

I have long considered RegClean to be very close to the “essential utility” category. Once version 4.1a came out resolving the minor acne problem of earlier versions, it was sweet sailing. In case you aren’t familiar with RegClean, it’s Microsoft freeware that helps clean some of the junk out of the Windows Registry. Specifically, it analyzes Registry keys in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, finds keys with erroneous values, exports them to an UNDO.REG file (so that, if something shouldn’t have been removed, it can be easily restored with a single click), then removes them from the Registry. For several years it was part of my routine system maintenance. To this day, I still enthusiastically recommend it for Windows 95, 98, ME, and 2000 systems.

But Microsoft’s own relationship to RegClean ran hot and cold. Periodically the standard Knowledge Base article on it would disappear; then, after a few weeks, it would pop up again as if it had never been gone. A few months ago, though, the KB article and Microsoft’s own download links for RegClean disappeared at the same time. Not having an inside track on what the future might bring, I slid the links on my freeware page over to third party sites that provided the same download, and waited to see what would happen.

What has happened is nothing. In other words, it’s gone, and probably will stay that way. I’m pretty sure what brought about the final death sentence. RegClean, it was discovered about a year ago, is seriously incompatible with Office 2000 and Office XP, according to KB Article Q299958. Now, Microsoft doesn’t want you not having Office on your computer, and doesn’t want you sticking back with Office 97. Probably they don’t want you sticking with the “ancient” Office 2000 now that Office XP is out and well established (though I, for one, am skipping the XP generation of Office and staying with the exceedingly fine 2000 version). My guess is that, since they don’t think in terms of a Windows computer without Office 2000 or XP on it, that doesn’t leave a lot of computers for which RegClean is a workable tool. (And it doesn’t work on Windows XP, either. By “doesn’t work” I mean, “can’t be counted on to work reliably without causing problems.”)

So, as I said, it doesn’t seem to be coming back. I had been keeping its download links alive nonetheless; but, this week, my primary download link for RegClean went dead. The hosting site is gone. I still know about a secondary RegClean download link on PC World’s site, but have no certainty in how long it will stick around either. Additionally, correspondent Edward Waxman has written me with another download link from ZDNet (who only recommend it for Windows 95, 98, and NT).

As a child, little RegClean was always fond of dinosaurs. Now it looks like he’s going to get his fondest wish — to meet them!

I’ve removed RegClean from the My Favorite Freeware page this evening. Nonetheless, by discussing it in this newsletter, including the one remaining valid download link that I have for it, I ensure that the link will survive as long as it’s good. Anyone using the Site Search will be able to find it. Otherwise, having eulogized Caeser, I now join my hand to those holding the knife in his back, and bid my old friend an affectionate adieu...

CRAZY WITH GLEE FOR NEOTRACE EXPRESS

If you frequent the microsoft.public newsgroups, you know him as “glee,” but his real name is Glen. He wrote me this week concerning my recommendation last issue to grab NeoTrace Express while we still can, and his input will be particularly valuable to users of older computers that don’t necessarily have everything updated to the latest and greatest:

I recently downloaded Neo Trace Express, as mentioned on your Downloads web page, per your warning that it might not be available in the near future. It is a cool app! There are a couple of interesting things I found, re: using it on an OSR2.0 [Windows 95B] machine with IE4 SP1 installed.

Reading the Help file and going to the Neo Trace website’s FAQ and System Requirements page, I found that it lists Winsock2 as a requirement, and also states that the web browser integration functions will require IE5 or higher. I found this to be only partially true.

I don’t have Winsock2 installed on this machine... in fact, it is the original Winsock for OSR2, with whatever IE4 SP1 128-bit may have modified. NeoTrace Express cares not, and runs fine here. Also, although there is no NeoTrace button added on the IE4 toolbar, the right-click context menu option, “Neo Trace It!”, does appear, and to my surprise the script actually works when used on a link on a Web page. It brings up NeoTrace and traces the link’s location. I had thought the script would fail on IE4 SP1, but apparently the program is more adaptable than the programmer thinks.

So, I am happily surprised at the greater functionality than I had anticipated... I honestly thought that the browser might crash when I tried the context menu item, but it is flawless, repeatedly. I can’t wait to add it to the Win98 SE machine in the other room.

No doubt, someone out there will have trouble with NeoTrace without Winsock2, but it works here. I thought you might like the added info, since you aren’t as crazy as meself, to run IE4 on anything. It is handy for testing, though lacking in some functionality.

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KB ARTICLES: Commands, Utilities & Files

After all this time, you probably didn’t expect me to add an XCopy section. But I did. Several good articles on the subject remain extremely helpful to users, especially in situations such as backups, system installation, and system migration. If you aren’t familiar with XCopy or its 32-bit sibling, now is a great time to learn about them.

Microsoft’s FileInfo utility in the Win98 Resource Kit describes XCopy as follows:

A popular command line utility. A much more powerful version of the copy command basically. Type “xcopy /?” without quotation marks at a command prompt for a list of available command line options that can be used with the xcopy utility.

Similarly, XCopy32 is summarized as follows:

A new version of the popular command line utility xcopy.exe. A much more powerful version of the copy command. When used inside of Windows 98, this special version, unlike xcopy.exe, is long file name (LFN) aware.

Here is the selection of XCopy/XCopy32 articles that were added to the Commands, Utilities & Files page this week. Pay particular attention to the middle one, a summary of the commandline switches that let XCopy and XCopy32 do their magic!

• “Invalid Path, 0 files copied” Using XCOPY Command Win95, Win98
• “Invalid Switch” Error Message When Attempting to Use XCOPY or XCOPY32 in MS-DOS Mode Win95, Win98, Win98 SE, Win ME
• Switches That You Can Use with XCOPY & XCOPY32 Commands Win95, Win98, Win98 SE, Win ME
• XCOPY Does Not Copy Attributes for Folders Win95, Win98
• XCOPY32 Does Not Prompt You Before Overwriting Files Win95, Win98

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KB ARTICLES: Windows Registry

Definition of the Run Keys in the Win XP Registry Win XP

This is another in a series of KB articles on the Windows XP Registry. This one just came out January 2, and joins several other related articles that have been discussed here in the past. Primarily, this article names those Registry keys that can cause programs to automatically run each time a user logs on — information already available on the Windows Support Center in the Startup Program Loading FAQ. Nonetheless, this KB article adds more information, including extra tricks on editing these keys to force specific types of load behaviors.

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KB ARTICLES: Shutdown & Restart

Computer Does Not Shut Down Properly if Selective Suspend Is Enabled Win XP

Some USB input devices, such as a USB keyboard or mouse, do not support the Selective Suspend power management feature. When these devices are used with Selective Suspend turned on, the computer may hang during shutdown, or otherwise not shutdown correctly. The work-around is to disable power management for your USB hub. To do that, open Device Manager (click Start, click Run, type DEVMGMT.MSC, click OK). Double-click to expand Universal Serial Bus Controllers. Double-click USB Root Hub. Click Power Management. Uncheck the box “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power.” OK your way out. NOTE: Doing this may significantly reduce laptop battery life.

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KB ARTICLES: Startup & Boot Log

Error Message When You Start Computer: Cannot Find the File SETUP98.EXE... Win98, Win98 SE

At Windows startup, you may receive one of the following error messages:

• Cannot find the file SETUP98.EXE (or one of its components). Make sure the path and filename are correct and that all required libraries are available.
• Could not load or run SETUP98.EXE. A specified file in your WIN.INI could not be found.

The cause? Just like the message says, SETUP98.EXE can’t be found or can’t load. Specifically, SETUP98.EXE is referenced in the WIN.INI file or in the Startup group (consisting of Startup folder items and programs that the Registry launches at startup), but isn’t installed on your computer. (Isn’t it amazing when the error message are actually accurate about this stuff? There are so many situations where they aren’t.) The KB article tells how to fix the problem.

Overview of the Mail Notification Display on the Win XP Welcome Screen Win XP

A lot people have been asking about this one. Personally, I don’t see why; but, to some people it’s a big deal, so we need to provide a solution. The problem: When Win XP boots, using the default Welcome screen, it displays, next to each user’s name, the number of new emails they have. A few people every week ask how to make this go away so that nobody can tell that they have email (or how many they haven’t answered lately). Work-arounds have been suggested thus far; but now we know an actual solution.

Each of the email accounts that is tabulated in that notice has a Registry entry for it. The System account on the computer (which is essentially Windows itself) updates the Registry entries. If you don’t want them updated, you can deny permission for the System account (that is, Windows) to access and alter the Registry keys. To do this, use RegEdit (after backing up your Registry, perhaps with ERUNT!) to go to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\UnreadMail

Click the + to expand UnreadMail. Right-click on each email account you don’t want tabulated on the Welcome page, and click Permissions. Select System. Check the boxes to deny everything. Then you can also edit the MessageCount value in each of these keys (right pane) to be 0 (the article doesn’t mention that). It looks like you have no pending email, and Windows is blocked from changing the values to make it look any different.

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Happy computing, everyone!

Jim Eshelman

THE NECESSARY LEGAL STUFF
DISCLAIMER: Any information given in this newsletter, or on any other part of the Windows Support Center Web site, is researched by me and believed to be accurate. However, I cannot guarantee, and do not guarantee, that all the information provided will work on all computer systems, for all users, all the time. Also, I sometimes make mistakes (that’s life!), and it is possible I made one or more of them here. All information herein is offered as-is and without warranty of any kind. In other words, I rely on the best information sources I can, but thereafter, you take your life in your own hands if you trust me on it. Neither James Eshelman, this site, outside contributors to this site, people quoted on this site, nor my cat is/are responsible for any loss, injury, or damage, direct or consequential, resulting from application of any information presented here.

The E-List. Copyright © 2002 by James A. Eshelman. All Rights Reserved.

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