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Under 64-bit Windows 7, I noticed the latest version of Acrobat Pro X (V10.1.2) becomes unresponsive for about 4-5 minutes after opening a PDF file.  Then everything is fine.  I found references to this problem being related to protected mode being used when opening PDF documents.  In the program's preferences, there's an Enhanced Security section.  When I disabled enhanced security, PDF documents started opening quickly.

Then I went back and turned enhanced security back on and added folder paths to the Privileged Locations you can specify as part of enhanced security and was able to open files from these locations without the delays.  Testing is not conclusive since I have been unable to make it go from fast to slow predictably.  However, turning off enhanced security was conclusive.

I was working on a few terminal servers that were extremely low on free disk space on a drive which also contained user profiles.  I came across a helpful tool called ICSweep from Ctrl-Alt-Del IT Consultancy and is freeware.  You can download it and other tools from http://www.ctrl-alt-del.com.au/CAD_TSUtils.htm.

“ICSweep is a command-line utility to clear the Temporary Internet Files Cache and/or the TEMP files folder of ALL user profiles that are NOT in use when this command is executed.  This utility was written for the purpose of allowing a SINGLE command to identify and clear Temporary Internet Files Cache and/ or TEMP files of ALL user profiles currently NOT in use.” [more]

Windows Compatible - 2000\XP\2003\Vista\2008\7
Citrix Compatible - Metaframe\Presentation Server\XenApp

Simply extract the zip file then run ICSweep from a command prompt with one of the following command line switches:

  /ALL   -   Delete both Temporary Internet Files and Temp files
  /TIF   -   Delete Temporary Internet Files only (Default)
  /TMP   -   Delete Temp files only
  /SIZE  -   Report the size of both Temporary Internet Files
                and Temp files in each profile NOT in use. This
                switch will also report the total size of
                both Temporary Internet Files and Temp files NOT
                in use. It DOES NOT DELETE any files.

Again, note that this is best done when all users are off of the server.  On one of the servers I ran this utility on, it cleaned up 6 GB of space alone.

As most know, when using PGP to encrypt a hard drive, you enter your password at the boot screen and it will log you into Windows. After redeploying a laptop for a new user, PGP would not pass the new username thru to Windows. It would stop at the Windows credential prompt with an previously used username. After a fair amount of troubleshooting and research, it was determined the problem was with the TPM chip.

PGP can be configured to use password only or TPM and password to authenticate users. PGP on this laptop had been configured to use TPM and password. The TPM chip had become locked out by the previous user. Which prevented new users from accessing the TPM chip. So you could add a new user to PGP but it never would add the user to the TPM configuration and there was no error stating this.  Since the old user’s password was not available, it required deactivating the TPM chip. Before deactivating TPM, the administrator account being used changed to password only in PGP. If this change wasn’t made to the administrator account first, it would have locked out of PGP. TPM was deactivated and the laptop rebooted. TPM was reactivated and the laptop rebooted. The new user account was added back to PGP and rebooted again. This time PGP passed the username through to Windows without any problems.

I was working in Word when it crashed and only presented me with the options to restart the program or close the program.

I closed the program and checked the document to see the last save time had been an hour or so earlier. When I opened the file, the “recovered document” options were not available and I could see the last hour’s work was not there.

I began to search for a solution which I found in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316951 “How to recover a lost Word document.”

There were several recommendations which I tried in sequence with no success. Finally I came down to the suggestion to search my entire hard drive for *.asd files. I did this and found several files, one was my a copy of my crashed document. I opened the *.asd file with word and found all my information in place with nothing lost. [more]

By the way the file was located in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word, which is the default location Word uses to store all “AutoRecover” files. And also by default on my computer, Word was set to autosave every 10 minutes and was set to keep the last autosaved version if Word is closed without saving.

Searching your entire drive for *.asd files, is a good idea if, for some reason, the default settings have been changed and as a result, you don’t know where the *.asd files might be saved.

You can double check the AutoRecover and Autosave settings in Word 2010 by going to Files>Options>Save. These features are also available in Excel and Powerpoint. The AutoRecover file locations are different for each application, but are easy to find by looking in the appropriate folders.

When I'm working on Word 2010 documents located on a file share, particularly when they are included in folders I have synched for offline use, I often receive an error message when trying to open the document.  The message tells me the document is locked for editing by 'another user' and asks if I want to:

1. Open a read only copy
2. Create a local copy and merge changes later
3. Receive notification when the original copy is available

I usually select the last option and wait a minute or two and then receive a message when I can change my access from read only to read/write.  However, this is inconvenient partly because the 'another user' error dialog box almost always ends up displaying underneath the explorer window I am using to open the documents since I usually am opening several related documents at the same time.  There is no indication the dialog box is there until I try to open another Word document and receive a message I must close an open dialog box, etc.  Once I dig around and find the open dialog box, I can respond to receive notification when the original copy is available. [more]
 
I found numerous notes about this type of problem others are having and found one that suggested I turn off the Windows explorer Details pane to see if that helped.  In fact, it fixed my problem.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-AU/word/thread/307d3e8d-914f-4e11-972d-59717098419b

However, I kind of like the information provided in the Windows explorer Details pane.  There was also a mention about applying the following hotfix if turning off the Details pane didn't work but I wasn't too excited about a hotfix unless it was absolutely necessary and the description of the hotfix didn't seem to exactly fit my problem.  In particular, it's for non-DFS errors and these files are on a DFS share.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2434932

During the installation and setup of VMware Capacity Planner we ran across a couple of servers that were not receiving performance data. After looking at GPOs and permissions, the problem still existed. It was discovered faulty performance counters could cause the problem. We connected via remote desktop to the problematic servers and opened the performance monitor. There was no data present and all the monitor names were changed to numeric values. This meant the performance monitors were corrupt causing the problem with VMWare Capacity Planner. The bank staff said they would address the problem.

One of our information security auditors recently had the motherboard on his laptop replaced to fix the "shutdown on its own" issue he'd been having for a while.  When he got the laptop back, his BIOS level fingerprint logins (to unlock the hard drive and BitLocker key) were no longer working.  Also, the x64 VMware machine he uses for audits would no longer boot.  The VM issue was pretty clear.  The CPU virtualization setting in the BIOS was disabled and needed to be turned back on.  The fingerprint issues, however, took a little more digging to figure out.  Eventually we realized the TPM on the new motherboard was not activated.  Once we activated and initialized the TPM, then turned BitLocker off and back on (without decryption), all the pre-boot login information unlocked by the fingerprint started working again.

One of our customers is using Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) to manage software on their network. SCCM requires a client to be installed on each computer. They wanted to use a VB script that checks common errors that cause the SCCM client to stop working and will install the client if it is not installed. I modified a script that was downloaded from the Internet that seemed to meet their needs. The customer has VB scripts set to edit instead of open, so I had to call the VB script from a batch file using cscript. [more]

The script ran fine when testing it from my login by calling it from a command prompt using cscript and then the file path. The batch files calls the VB script, which then does several tests and calls the SCCM install exe if necessary. After setting up group policy to run the script as a startup script, the script would start to run and then fail in the middle of the SCCM client install. During testing, we inserted a “pause” at the end of the batch file and found that the SCCM client installed properly.

What was happening was the SCCM install would immediately quit when the parent batch file ended. There are two ways to fix this problem. The first is to add “ping 127.0.0.1 –n 600” so the batch script will stay open for 10 minutes, which is enough time for the install to complete. Occasionally, this method causes the computer to wait until the batch file completes before it will load the user’s desktop. The second option is to run the batch file as a scheduled task. The scheduled task will be set by another batch files run through group policy. The scheduled task option seems to be the most reliable path at this point because no side effects are seen with this method.

I recently ran into a situation wehre Windows 2003 SBS was refusing remote desktop connections completely because two people were logged in remotely. I had logged in to a customer’s Windows 2003 SBS to help troubleshoot various connectivity.  I needed to have the customer also be able to RDP to the server, but when they tried to connect to the server it said that it could not be reached.  This server was not running terminal services on it, which means that the server is limited to having two remote connections at a time.
 
Normally, on a regular Windows 2003 Server (not SBS), it will go ahead and allow the remote desktop connection to be established, but it will display an error message at login stating that the maximum number of sessions on the server has been reached.  In this case, it refused connections entirely for remote desktop, but the server could be pinged. What I didn’t realize initially was that there was another person logged into the server besides me.  When I logged off, then the customer could immediately contact the server again.