Blog: Windows 7

I ran into another notable gotcha working with VMware View v4. I set up Windows 7 virtual machines in linked clone pools, but I was not able to get dual-monitors to work using PCoIP. After several hours of very frustrating troubleshooting, it turns out that VMware has changed the type of display driver that is included with the VMTools install on Windows 7. Prior to Windows 7, VMware used an SVGA II driver for all Windows guest OSes. With Windows 7, they are now “experimenting” with a new WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) driver. The default VMTools install for Windows 7 uses the WDDM driver instead of the SVGA II driver. Here are some notable limitations of the WDDM driver:

• No support for OpenGL
• No multimonitor support
• VM may be slow to respond or resume
• Overlay video acceleration is disabled (basically this means flash acceleration and MMR is disabled) [more]

I’m thinking this thing isn’t fully cooked…The original article I found on this had me extract the SVGA II adapter from Workstation 7, but it appears as if new versions of the VMTools actually include it at install time, but its just not used. So, here are the instructions to revert to the SVGA II adapter so that stuff actually works!

1. Open Device Manager from Control Panel
2. Expand Display Adapters entry
3. Right click on VMWare SVGA 3D (WDDM) and click properties
4. Click on Uninstall Button
5. Check the “Delete the driver software for this device” option
6. Click OK
7. Your screen may flicker as the driver is removed.  
8. Close Device Manager and reboot Windows 7.
9. Windows will default to the Standard VGA device
10. Open Device Manager, expand Display Adapters
11. Right Click Standard VGA and select Properties
12. Click on Update Driver
13. Click on Browse my Computer 
14. Browse to directory C:\Program Files\Common Files\VMware\Drivers\video
15. Click Next
16. Confirm driver installation
17. Close window and reboot

While working at a customer site a couple of users reported Word 2007 has no page number gallery when you go Insert -> Page Numbers. After investigating I found that just deleting the Building Blocks.dotx file in their profile fixed the problem.

Windows XP Location:
c:\Documents and Settings\{your username}\Application Data\Microsoft\Document Building Blocks\1033\Building Blocks.dotx

Windows Vista & 7 Location:
c:\Users\{your username}\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Document Building Blocks\1033\Building Blocks.dotx

I upgraded from Vista to Windows 7 about three weeks ago.  I decrypted my PGP encrypted drive before the upgrade and, after the upgrade, PGP recognized my disk wasn't encrypted and prompted me to encrypt my drive.  I started the encryption process but wound up pausing the process because of slow performance, intending to resume it after hours.  I installed some Windows and Lenovo (ThinkDamage…probably my 2nd mistake) updates which required a reboot.  After the reboot, PGP started trying to install itself and produced this error message…

"You cannot upgrade or remove PGP while a whole disk is processing. Installation terminated." [more]

I was unable to access the PGP console in order to resume the encryption, decrypt, etc.  An attempt to uninstall PGP produced the same error.  This was not good since I was scheduled to leave town on an audit within 24 hours and thought I might have to abandon the upgrade to Windows 7, restore a backup and re-encrypt the old Vista image before I left town.

A coworker suggested I log a ticket with PGP.  After doing so, I was poking around their site, searching for various terms from the error message and stumbled across a reference to a command line command.  About that same time, I received an auto-response from PGP which included several links, the last of which led me to information about the same command line command, pgpwde.

Here is the relevant section from the page above:

SECTION 2 - PGPWDE Command Line

The following commands will help diagnose and decrypt the disk. Other commands can be listed by typing pgpwde --help.

1. To begin working with the PGPWDE interface open a command prompt and change to the PGP installation directory (default directory shown) C:\Program Files\PGP Corporation\PGP desktop.
2. To list all installed hard disks in the system type: pgpwde --enum. Entering this command will give us a list of disks with numbers we will use in the next few steps.
3. Now type pgpwde --status --disk 1. Substitute the PGP WDE disk number listed in the previous step for the number 1 in the command if different. The output of this command will tell us whether the disk is still encrypted.
   • If the disk is not encrypted, "Disk 1 is not instrumented by bootguard" will be the output.
   • If the disk is encrypted, the output will display:
     • "Disk 1 is instrumented by Bootguard."
     • The total number of sectors.
     • A Highwater value (number of sectors encrypted).
     • Whether the current key is valid.
4. Type pgpwde --list-user --disk 1. This will tell us the user information contained on the disk. This will help in multi-user environments to determine which user passphrase was used to implement WDE.
5. Type pgpwde --decrypt --disk 1 --passphrase {mypasswordhere}. This will start the decryption process. To view progress, type the status command listed in step 3 and note the Highwater number, this number will get smaller and smaller as the number of sectors encrypted decreases.

This command line command allowed me to decrypt the partially encrypted disk.  I then uninstalled PGP to be safe, reinstalled PGP and encrypted my disk without further incident.

I use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse under Windows 7 (64-bit) that started to hang from time to time after I began using Windows 7.  I found that if I turned the BT radio off then back on it would work fine.  Sometimes it would hang after I stopped using the keyboard or mouse for just a few seconds.  Sometimes it was after I hadn't used it for several minutes.  Regardless, I couldn't see any relationship to how long it hadn't been used and when it would hang.

I found if I went into Device Manager > Bluetooth Radios and opened the properties to ThinkPad Bluetooth 2.1 with Enhanced Data Rate and then unchecked the "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" option, the problem went away. [more]

At a client site, I have been testing some automated ways to move users from v1 to v2 profiles. All their users are on Windows XP and we are moving them to Windows 7. I was looking specifically for a graceful way to allow interoperability between the profile versions and keep us from having to touch every user profile to copy over data. What I found was a little annoying. There is really only two ways to migrate data from v1 to v2 profiles.

1. Use Folder redirection to share data between the profile versions by redirecting relevant data to a network share that can be used by both profiles.
2. Use the user state migration tool [more]

If you are NOT using roaming profiles, the USMT is the best way. If you are using roaming profiles, the folder redirection is the best way. The gotcha here is to make sure you create the folder redirection policy FIRST on a Windows Vista, 7, or 2008 system BEFORE editing it on a Windows XP or 2003 system. There is something about the way the GPO is created/built that will not allow it to apply to vista, 7 , and 2008 systems if it is created with XP or 2003 first.

I have been having an annoying problem with right mouse clicks and Windows-E keystrokes for some time on my laptop. Finally, I got disgusted enough to spend the time to research and fix. It turns out that these problems are typically related to context handlers that are instantiated when you do the right mouse click on a file/windows background etc. There is a program from NirSoft called ShellExView which will list these programs that are available to the context menus. It allows you to disable a particular shell extension and test to see if that particular shell extension is causing your problem. One of our network engineers also reported that this happened to him when he had a program he removed (the removal process must be defective) and the context menu item was still available but missing.

I was trying to connect a VPN from Terminal Server that was recently upgraded to Windows 2008 and when I would connect, I would lose my terminal server connection completely.  I would then have to log my session from a different server using Terminal Services Manager.  I tested the same VPN connection on a local Windows 7 machine and experienced similar issues where all of my network connections were dropped upon connection. 

Upon examining the properties of the VPN connection entry, there was a checked setting to use the default gateway on the remote network.  Unchecking this box through the IPv4 properties stopped the disconnects from happening.  I also recommend unchecking the use of IPv6; it also has the same options to use the remote network’s gateway.  [more]

Two quick Windows 7 tricks that I ran across a short while back.

• Shift+Maximize will span across two monitors. Don’t know about three or more.
• Shift+Minimize will apply a window shade effect on the title bar instead of minimizing it to the task bar.

A while back I mentioned that you can just enter sendto in the start/run field and it would open your sendto folder.  There are many of these shell folders – special folders that may be on disk, or may be fabricated by the OS.  The “correct” way to reference these is with the “shell:” prefix.  So you can specify shell:sendto, shell:startup, shell:favorites, etc. [more]

The full list is in your registry at

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderDescriptions

Note: The name in the registry does not always match the name you see in explorer.