Edit registry offline

A Windows XP box came into our shop, infected with malware last Friday.  It would boot part way into Windows and then crash with a BSOD stating something like "Unable to load basebow32.dll – unable to load the application, reinstalling might fix this".  To fix, I placed the infected HD in a clean Windows XP box (as a secondary drive), launched regedit, clicked on HKEY_Local_Machine, went to the File menu, Load Hive, and selected the Infected_Drive\Windows\System32\config\SYSTEM file.  Searched it for references to "basebow32" and removed them.  Problem solved!

Symantec AV removal

How do you uninstall the corporate version of Symantec antivirus if it's password protected & you don't know the password?

First, try the word "symantec".  If that doesn't work, open regedit and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Intel\LANDesk\VirusProtect6\CurrentVersion\AdministratorOnly\Security.  Change the useVPuninstallpassword from 1 to 0.  Close the registry editor and retry the uninstall.

Bad ECC RAM

Windows 2003 wouldn't boot on a client's server, claiming that it's SYSTEM registry hive was corrupt.  Strangely, not only was I unable to boot from the HD, I couldn't get any of my bootable CDs to work either!  I even tried a different CD drive.  The culprit?  A bad RAM module.  The registry and my bootable CDs were just fine.

Internet health

On May 21, several customers called in to complain about slow Internet access.  They all had one thing in common: their ISP was TDS.  A major fiber line in the Chicago area had been cut by construction.  A co-worker then introduced me to InternetHealthReport.com

Missing Icons

A month ago, I copied all the files from a repaired HD onto a new, blank HD for a laptop running Windows Vista.  After repairing the boot sector on the new drive, I was able to boot into Vista just fine.  The puzzling thing was that none of the programs installed by the Windows Installer had an icon!  This was because my file copy program had skipped C:\Windows\Installer.

For more reading, about icon issues, see these links:

Windows Installer

Default programs

Icon Cache