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Brace for the WTF:

So convinced of their views, they’re willing to sacrifice the lives of their countrymen just to prove a point? I don’t care how much I disagreed with the Bush Administration, never once did I hope for another attack on my country. *THIS* is why conservatism is a twisted ideology.

I was going to write a post about the point that this cartoon drives home, but such a post would be rather lengthy and probably ranting so instead, enjoy this cartoon courtesy of McClatchy:

The following vbs code will disable Advanced Text Services:

Option Explicit
Dim objShell
Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
objShell.RegWrite _
"HKCU\Software\Microsoft\CTF\Disable Thread Input Manager", "1", "REG_DWORD"
objShell.RegWrite _
"HKCU\Software\Microsoft\CTF\Langbar\ExtraIconsOnMinimized", "0", "REG_DWORD"
objShell.RegWrite _
"HKCU\Software\Microsoft\CTF\Langbar\ShowStatus", "2", "REG_DWORD"
objShell.RegWrite _
"HKCU\Software\Microsoft\CTF\MSUTB\ShowDeskBand", "1", "REG_DWORD"

If you would like to uninstall this service completely (and prevent ctfmon.exe from running) then see the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/282599

I still have a few users who use Outlook 2002. For the most part, they don’t have any reason to upgrade as it still meets their needs and I can’t justify telling them to spend ~$300 per user just to do what they’re already doing (sending/receiving e-mail… If I had my way, they’d all be using Thunderbird.) Today however, I encountered the following bug:

(1) User composes an e-mail (using word as their mail editor). The user also attaches either a word, excel, or powerpoint attachment to the message (tested with all three file types).

(2) User saves the message to drafts.

(3) A little while later, the user decides to finish writing this e-mail. They casually double click the attachment (in this case, a word document) link below the subject line and get the following message:

No big deal right? We’ve all seen this before. But there’s a problem! When they try to click on the ‘Open it’ option, Outlook is unresponsive. The only thing they can do at this point is kill OUTLOOK.EXE via the task manager. What makes this even weirder is that if the user re-opens Outlook, navigates to the ‘Drafts’ folder, opens the message and instead right-clicks the attachment, then selects ‘Open’ from the context menu, the problem does not manifest itself when the user tries to click the ‘Open it’ option on the subsequent warning message.

In this case, the user is accessing Outlook via a Terminal Services session, so upon being notified by the user that “my Outlook is frozen”, I login and take over their session. I do not notice a problem; I was able to click on the ‘Open it’ option just fine and Outlook was responsive. The user was happy that I fixed their problem and all was well… until it happened again. And again. So now I’m in WTF mode. I was able to recreate the error—it occurs whenever you (1) are composing a message with an attachment, and then double click on the attachment or (2) do the same thing from a message saved in ‘Drafts’. Right-clicking and selecting ‘Open’ _always_ works however. After googling for a few minutes, I came to the conclusion that this had something to do with “Advanced Text Services” so I disabled it, closed Outlook, logged out, logged in, opened Outlook, tried to recreate the error again and everything worked just fine!

To disable Advanced Text Services (in Windows XP/2003 … probably others):

1. Click Start, then Control Panel.
2. If Control Panel is in Category view, click the Date, Time, Language, and Regional Options link, and then click the Regional and Language Options icon.
   If Control Panel is in Classic view, double-click the Regional and Language Options control panel.
3. Click the Languages tab. Click Details.
4. Click the Advanced tab. Check Turn off advanced text services.
5. Click OK. Click OK.
6. Close the control panel

Or, if you’d like to disable this feature automatically (via domain login script), click here.

If you’ve recently moved MAS 200 data from one server to another, you might encounter the following error:

There are a few things to check before calling Sage’s tech support:

(1) Permissions

Yep. Permissions. It’s a simple mistake to make and it’s easily resolved.

1. Just navigate to ‘C:\Program Files\Sage Software’ (or wherever your MAS 200/90 installation resides.
2. Right-click on the ‘MAS 200′ directory, select ‘Properties’.
3. Select the ‘Security’ tab and select the ‘Advanced’ button.
4. Make sure that the permissions are correct; if not, correct them.
5. Then check the box next to: ‘Replace permission entries on all child objects with entries shown here that apply to child objects’
6. Then click ‘Apply’.
7. Click ‘Ok’ on the warning that appears.
8. Click ‘Ok’ to close the window.

(2) If #1 doesn’t fix your problem, then clear the ‘Spawn Session from Application Server’ check box.

Note: Do not perform this step if the check box was selected to resolve connection issues, for example “Connection failure to host…”

1. Expand Modules, Library Master, and Main. Double-click User Maintenance.
2. Select the user ID.
3. Click the Preferences tab.
4. Clear the Spawn Session from Application Server check box.
5. Click Accept.
6. Repeat for each affected user.

(3) If the error still occurs, and the report is on the Custom Reports menu, the path and file name may be too long.

1. Delete the report from the Custom Menu.
2. Rename the file to a shorter name. Note: Try 55 characters or less for the entire path and file name. Some experimentation may be required. The exact length that causes the error is still being researched (as of v. 4.0)
   
3. Add the report back to the Custom Menu.

If you are *still* having the problem then you should call MAS 200 tech support.