Icons changed in Windows Explorer, Desktop, and Taskbar… in Vista
All of a sudden, a number of my icons changed from their specific normal Vista icons to a generic Windows 2000 icon. This happened to icons on the Desktop, in Windows Explorer, and in Windows’ Taskbar (including Quick Launch and the display of open programs).
I tried several things — including restoring to an earlier point from the same day. Nothing worked to fix the problem, until… I Googled about it and came up with this link:
Don Varnau, an IE MS MVP, posted a solution that worked for me. I eliminated a step to avoid confusion:
Right-click the desktop and choose Personalize®Tasks (left side)®Change desktop icons®Restore default. When you click Personalize, the Personalization section of the Control Panel opens. Click on Change desktop icons to display the Desktop Icon Settings dialog. Finally, click Restore Default.
And, presto! I’m back in business.
Windows Mail main window font too small in Vista?
Do you find the default font in Windows Mail’s main window (see below — shown after resizing to 12 points) too tiny to read? What? You say the default 9 points isn’t big enough? It’s not big enough for me, either.
Fortunately, it’s not cast in stone. It’s controlled by Icon text size, accessible in Windows’ Appearance Settings.
To change it, right-click on Vista’s desktop and choose Personalize. In the Personalization settings, click on Window Color and Appearance. From there, click on the link to Open classic appearance properties for more color options. Then click on the Advanced button to display the Advanced Appearance dialog box, shown below.
Click the dropdown arrow next to Item, and choose Icon. Set the Font: Size: control to the desired font size, then click OK. Back in Appearance Settings, click either on OK or Apply (the latter if you think you might want to experiment a little before settling).
This setting will also make any text on the desktop itself larger, as well. Now, for me personally, that’s that a bad thing, but you might want to experiment with Item Size: if the larger text results in text being clipped on the desktop or in other place controlled by the Icon Font Size setting.
Outlook 2007, Vista, Firefox, and General Failure
Should we salute General Failure?
For some reason, over the past few days, many Firefox users have encountered the General Failure error message when clicking links in Outlook. I haven’t yet tracked down the why in each case (one why occurs when you install the beta of Firefox 3, then remove it and revert to a still-installed Firefox 2.x), but several solutions seem to be floating around:
- Remove and reinstall Firefox;
- Change the default browser to Internet Explorer, then change it back to Firefox;
- Delete the (Default) REG_SZ registry value found at:HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\FirefoxURL\shell\open\ddeexec
i.e., replace what’s stored for (Default) with nothing; double-click (Default), select and delete what’s stored for Value data.
Caveat: editing the registry incorrectly can result in your computer not working anymore. It also is a major cause of global warming. Edit the registry at your own risk.
Very Nasty Vista Bug
Do not try this on any files you want to keep.
- In Vista, select a group of files you want to rename.
- Press F2 (Rename), and type a new name. The files are all renamed using that name, but each file after the first has a number added a la (1), (2), etc.
- Click EditðUndo Rename. The file are restored to their original names. So far, so good.
- Click EditðRedo Rename. All but one of the files disappear – they are permanently and irrevocably gone. History. Poof. All she wrote.
This is exceedingly nasty.
| Note: If you don’t have but want the menu bar in Vista’s Windows Explorer click OrganizeðLayoutðMenu Bar. |
Language bar context menu problem
When I right-click the language bar, the context menu is mostly obscured by the Taskbar. When I right-click other parts of the Taskbar, this does not happen.
Creating New Word 12 Files from Windows Explorer
A few days ago, in one of the public newsgroups, someone posted about a problem when creating new Word files in Windows Explorer. First, set your default font in Word to something other than Calibri 11 point. To do this, press Ctrl+D, select a different font and/or point size, then click Default. Click Yes to changing the default. If prompted later, say Yes to saving the changes in Normal.dotm.
Next, try the following:
- In Windows Explorer, right click in the files area and choose New->Microsoft Office Word Document.
- Type a name for the file, the double-click to open it.
- Regardless of your own default font and point size, Word will have created a file that uses Calibri 11 point as the default font.
Now, try it again, only this time choose New->Microsoft Office Word 97-2003 Document. This time, Word will correctly use your defaults, rather than its own hard-coded Calibri 11.
CAUTION: Editing the registry can damage windows and prevent your computer, office, and word from starting. It can also put out an eye. Edit your registry at your own risk.
The behavior for Word 97-2003 documents is controlled by the registry’s settings for what it does when you create a new .doc file in the “shell” (Windows Explorer). This is controlled by the following registry location:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.doc\Word.Document.8\ShellNew
In particular, it’s controlled by the FileName variable, which tells the system to look for WINWORD8.DOC, contained in the \windows\ShellNew folder.
If you look down a little later, however at:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.docx\Word.Document.12\ShellNew
there is no FileName variable. So, when you create a new .docx file this way, Word sees that there is no reference template or file, and it uses its own internal default Calibri 11 rather than the user’s default font settings.
A partial fix for this behavior is to create a new FileName variable in the docx registry location, pointing to a file that contains the desired default fonts, such as a file you might name WINWORD12.DOCX (you would need to create that file, too, not just a pointer to it). Then, when you create a new file using the NewðMicrosoft Office Word Document method from Windows Explorer, it will use the defaults contained in that file (WINWORD12.DOCX, for example).
This does not solve the whole problem, however. That’s because when you change the default font in Word 12, it stores the new default in Normal.dotm and in WINWORD8.DOC. The change doesn’t get communicated to your WINWORD12.DOCX.
The obvious solution is to point the .docx\Word.Document.12\ShellNew FileName variable at WINWORD8.DOC, right? Well, that is what logic dictates. However, when you do that and create a new file, the resulting file cannot be opened by Word. So, FileName has to point to a different file.
You might be tempted to point FileName at Normal.dotm in its default location. This, too, doesn’t work. It tells you that the folder is in use, creates two new files (instead of one), and both use Calibri 11 regardless of your default settings. So, unless someone else discovers a different work-around, we’re left with half a solution.
Of course, if you create new files from within Word 12/2007 itself, then you don’t need this solution. You need this solution only if you’re addicted to the Windows Explorer method. In a later article, I’ll look at other solutions.
Repost from 3/8/2007
March 8, 2007
Dian Chapman, my technical editor for the Word 2007 Bible, tells me that her two copies of the book arrived yesterday. I still haven’t seen any yet. I emailed Jim Minatel (my AE) to find out why not, and he tells me that the first printing is already out of stock! They’ve ordered a second printing, which will be ready next week. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Wal-Mart, and other online booksellers seem to have it in stock. So, Wiley’s warehouse loss is their gain. If you order the book now, there should be no delay in its shipping to you.
On the computer front, I ultimately determined that either the motherboard or the GeForce 7300GT was defective. I exchanged the T470 for a different one, and this one has been working like gangbusters. I sure wish I hadn’t invested five days trying to get it to work. But, at least I now have a better idea about how to recognize defective hardware… as opposed to defective Vista drivers. Even so, I’m still gun-shy about installing new versions of the driver.
My most recently solved Vista mystery—apparently—was the presence of an error in my events log:
The following boot-start or system-start driver(s) failed to load: i8042prt
I searched the internet, and didn’t find much specific having to do with Vista. However, in an old Windows 2000 discussion—in Spanish, no less—someone indicated that you see that error message when your mouse and/or keyboard are connected using USB rather than the PS/2 connectors. So, apparently, it’s nothing to worry about. I’m blogging about it here so it might be useful to someone else when they search for the error message.
Another pending mystery—and I hope it doesn’t recur—is why my computer suddenly started saying that my Documents folder was off-limits this morning. This morning while editing an Excel spreadsheet, I suddenly got an error message that the file I was editing was in use and that I couldn’t save to it.
Because I didn’t want to lose what I was doing, I decided to take a quick screen shot. When I tried to save the screen shot, I was informed that I didn’t have permission to access my Documents folder. So, I grabbed the camera, and took a picture of the data onscreen as a last resort.
During this time, the computer was responding extremely slowly, but I didn’t see anything grabbing the CPU in the Task Manager.
I closed everything and rebooted, and the problem has not [yet] recurred. I studied the event logs, but I don’t see anything that happened during that time.
I have two suspicions so far, neither of which are based on anything solid:
- My first suspicion is that it has something to do with having installed NOD32 last night — always suspect the new guy, right? — but, that’s just a desperate grasp.
- My second suspicion–this is a new computer with an Intel Core2Duo 6300–is that the CPU developed schizophrenia, and that possession of everything disk-based resided in one of the cores and was claiming ownership of my user files and folders, while the other core had suddenly assumed control of the program memory space, and wouldn’t let me access anything because the other core “owned” it.
In months and months of beta testing Vista and running RTM, I never had anything like this happen. But, all my testing/running until this past Tuesday was with a single core Pentium 4, and my A/V software was AVG, not NOD32.
Anybody seen anything similar?
My next adventure is to decide whether to replace Vista Home Premium with Vista Ultimate. Actually, I already know that I’m going to do that. But, I think I’ll install my large SATA, first, and install Vista Ultimate on it. Now, I’ll need to decide whether to install the 32 bit or 64 bit version… or both—maybe one to my X partition and other to my Z partition.
I also want to boost my RAM to 4 GB. It turns out that the 7300GT actually uses shared memory—robbing almost 500MB from main memory—in addition to its own 256MB. Greedy little sucker. I could try to turn off this sharing, but when I did that on the defective T470, my graphics index score went from 4.3 down to 1.0! So, I think I’ll try the upping-the-memory solution, instead.
Last night as I was responding…
Last night as I was responding to an email message, I got a cryptic message when I clicked Send. It was so cryptic–and came amid other odd system happenings–that I failed to see exactly what it said. The upshot was that Outlook 2007 needed to be closed. When I tried to restart it, I got a dialog telling me I needed to reinstall Outlook.
Not good news.
So, I rebooted.
Same problem.
I checked the event viewer and found hundreds of these errors, all associated with Outlook:
Failed to determine if the store is in the crawl scope (error=0×80040155).
Not good. Whatever the heck that means. For more on this problem, go here. I was in flailing mode, however, and didn’t discover that discussion until the next morning.
Next, I tried starting Word 2007 and Excel 2007. Same problem. Word 2003 still worked. So, my next step was to attempt to repair Office 2007. I tried to launch Change from Programs and Features, but was told that the installation was corrupted! Uh, oh!
At this point, I was beginning to suspect either hard disk corruption or registry corruption. I backed up my key files to my Maxtor OneTouch II, and booted to my other Vista drive. It seemingly worked fine.
At that point, I was beginning to wonder about Windows Updates. Perhaps one of them had screwed me over. I worried in particular about this one, which I had been prompted to install after adding an additional 2 GB of RAM to the computer. Yet, that one was installed over a week ago, and the updates installed since that time didn’t seem particularly suspect.
Other suspicious factors include the fact that Outlook 2007’s search ability had stopped working. So, I had run a repair earlier in the day. The repair fixed the search. But, I was beginning to wonder if the repair had somehow set up a chain of events that led to the registry having become scrambled.
I tried launching Word with the /r switch to see if it would fix the registry. No joy.
Yet another factor among the recently changed is the use of the NoRereg registry item. Had it somehow prevented some kind of self-healing that Office 2007 sometimes performs?
The other recently added item were drivers for a ViewSonic 22″ monitor. Costco had dropped the price to $299, and I couldn’t resist. But, to work, it needed special drivers for the 1680×1050 resolution.
Having concluded that the problem simply had to be registry corruption, I decided to drop back to a restore point from the previous day.
That managed to fix the problem.
Now more paranoid than ever, however, I’ve changed my update settings so that it will no longer automatically fetch and install updates at 3 am. Instead, I will review updates and selectively decide whether to apply them.
And, now I’m worrying that the problem will recur. <sigh> It’s always something.
Vista’s Narrator, your head, and the wall
It’s a laudable idea. One of Vista’s “ease of access” features is something called the Narrator. StartAll ProgramsAccessoriesEase of AccessNarrator. In theory, it can read your documents aloud to you. Nice, eh? If you’re blind or just tired, sit back and leave the reading to the Narrator.
Except that it doesn’t work with Word 2007 (or Word 2003 for that matter). Some useful shortcut keys that allow you to quickly make this determination are:
| CTRL | Stop Narrator from reading text |
| INSERT+F3 | Read the current character |
| INSERT+F4 | Read the current word |
| INSERT+F5 | Read the current line |
| INSERT+F6 | Read the current paragraph |
| INSERT+F7 | Read the current page |
| INSERT+F8 | Read the current document |
In Word, any of the Insert+F key assignments tell you “Empty document,” “Empty page,” and so on. A feeble work-around is to copy the text into WordPad or Notepad, where Narrator works just fine. But, don’t waste a lot of time trying to get it to work for you in Word 2007 or 2003—or even in Internet Explorer. I’ve already wasted a bunch of time for you, so you don’t have to waste your own. It’s just one of the many services I’m more than happy to provide.
I’ll let you know when and if there is a fix.