Cancel a remotely initiated shutdown

If a shutdown of your system has been initiated remotely you will see a dialog similar to this:



To kill this dialog and cancel the shutdown, open up a command prompt window as administrator.  Then issue the following command:

shutdown -a

The "a" stands for abort.  You can also use the shutdown command to initiate your own shutdown of remote systems.  You can send messages and manipulate many different aspects of the windows shutdown procedure with this command and its parameters.

Cancel restart from automatic updates

Have you ever been working on a very important project and needed to put off the forced restart that many system administrators have setup on their domain?

As long as you have local admin rights it is a simple process of running the following command from the command prompt.

sc stop wuauserv

Sc.exe is part of the windows resource toolkit, it is called Service Control and can be used for all sorts of service manipulation.  The stop word is fairly self explanitory.  The final word is simply the name of the service to be stopped, in this case the service running the windows update that controls the annoying dialog.

Create Strong Name Key - Access Denied Error

I recently ran into this error when trying to generate a new strong name key file.

I found the solution here:

I had to give my user account access to the key container in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys. It turns out, even administrator rights were disabled on my machine! I am not sure if this was the default installation (I rebuilt the machine a few weeks ago) or if this is modified when I install WinFX, or if when I granted ASP.NET and NETWORK SERVICE access it somehow lost the inherited permissions that were granted when I installed the OS. In any case, at least it seems predictable, you need access to the key store in order to generate keys, makes sense!

Copy and Paste from Excel to MS Access says corrupt clipboard

I was trying to copy a massive amount of information from MS Excel 2007 to MS Access 2007.

After going through all the standard troubleshooting like rebooting and making sure all versions were compatible, I mentioned the issue to my co-worker.  Fortunately for me my co-worker had already experience and spent time figuring out the issue; when I heard what the problem was I was glad he was the one who did the leg work figuring it out.  I didn't do that much work with Excel and Access so I wasn't sure when the problem had begun.

Turns out a relatively recent Microsoft Excel security update ( KB958437)  was the culprit.  As soon as I got that uninstalled copy and paste between the two apps started working again.

Add or Remove Programs list not populating

I spent several days trying to figure out why my Add or Remove Programs list no longer populated.  It would just sit there saying populating, but not actually displaying any programs.

Finally I happened accross this thread, where someone was talking about an extra drive of their causing problems.  Turns out I had an external hard drive that was corrupted, as soon as I turned it off the list started working again.

Windows updates failing to install

I recently had an issue where my windows updates simply failed to install. They would download just fine but never installed.

I found a fix here:
[quote]
Go here and see if it works

http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/

fix any issues, then validate it.

If it still doesn't work try this

Re-register the Windows Update DLL with the commands below
Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.
Type the following commands. Press ENTER after each command.
regsvr32 wuapi.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32 wucltui.dll
regsvr32 wups.dll
regsvr32 wups2.dll
regsvr32 wuweb.dll

Attempt to run Windows Update

Now what do you get?
[/quote]

The problem in the thread had a different source than mine, he had cloned his OS onto a new HD. In my case I had a fresh install of WinXP that was barely a month old.

Download IE6 standalone dll's

dhtmldev.com - Standalone IE6 for Testing Most users still use Internet Explorer 6, while most developers have upgraded to ie7. So how do you test in ie6? Most people designate another machine as an ie6 box, and then turnoff automatic updates. Oops, it was upgraded by the new guy. Nice. Anyway, for one reason or another it would be sweet to run both ie6 and ie7 on the same computer. After a lot of googling "ie6 side by side install" and "ie standalone" etc., and reading a bunch of crap, I found a nice standalone version at browsers.evolt.org and a nice added dll from positioniseverything. So I zipped everything (link at bottom) and wrote these instructions. Enjoy!