[deXter]

Yes, you won't need IE6 updates anymore. You can check this for youself at Microsoft's TechNet website. Look at any recent IE-6 hotfix technet page, and see the products applicable. More often than not, you'll find IE7 under "Products not affected".

I have a feeling that it deletes files that aren't present in the update list but present in the download folder. Not sure though.

@eris23: KB92808 isn't an update, its just an article that lists out the XML vulnerabilities that are present in msxml4 and msxml6. (KB927978 and KB927977) @rj66: How about adding msxml6-KB927977-enu-x86.exe to the list? And since IE7 is being deployed through Automatic Updates, should 922760 be included in the update lists? (922760 affects only IE6)

Thanks, yes it is a confirmed update! Still, no Google or Mircosoft search results throw up.. Anyways the update can be downloaded from: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...&DisplayLang=en Weird though cause this happened to me for the first time; I was always able to lookup updates on the web as soon as they came.. Looks like the web has been slow to catchup on this one ^_^

Automatic Updates picked it up today: Funny thing is, the update hasn't been documented anywhere at all! Neither Google, Filemirrors, Microsoft or even MSFN's search engines threw up any results. Can anyone shed some light on this mystery update? Coincidentaly the system was also infected by AdWare.ShowBehind at the time of the update. Is it possible the malware somehow hijacked Automatic Updates? I mean, of course technically anything is possible, but then ShowBehind hasn't been documented to do so; or for that matter I don't think there even exist a malware that hijacks Automatic Updates. If anyone wants I can post the KB908519.log and/or the contents of C:\WINDOWS\$NtUninstallKB908519$\ Title Edited - Please follow new posting rules from now on. --Zxian

**** I'm liking Symantec more and more! Just yesterday morning I discovered a new virus strain which wasn't detectable by any AV and wasn't documented anywhere on web either! So I analyzed the virus, documented exactly what it did and submitted it to them. I immediately got a reply that my submission was accepted, and is being processed. A few hours later, I got another auto-reply saying that the new virus has now been officially recognized! The new signature was added to the virusdefs and bam after updating SAV can now remove it! All in a span of few hours! And today I checked up the Symantec Security Response site, and noticed that the new virus has been documented, and in full detail too! Btw, for those interested, you can always get the latest and by latest I mean hourly updated defs here: http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcen...a.download.html You ought' to download that in one go; cause if you pause and resume later, for all you know the defs already been updated! (I tried pausing and downloading an hour later, file size was already changed.)

Eh, why would you even need to install ad-aware? Ad-Aware runs off just fine without any installers. All you need is the Ad-Aware.exe and the defs.ref file. Just copy these two files anywhere and ur done. No need for messy installers, answer files and what not.

Yeah, XP has this weird things with modems. I myself had this problem for a long time. I had solved it by making a script that starts the device manager and scans for hardware changes (this is a faster method instead of running 'add new hardware'), closes the device manager and dials my connection. Only recently I figured out why XP was forgetting that my modem was there: Its because of an IRQ conflict! (And you thought you'd never hear the word IRQ again, didnt ya?) Since XP supposedly handles all IRQ resources well, the thing doesn't even allow you to manually set the IRQ! In my case, my modem was connected to COM1. The IRQ was in use by COM2 port! So I disabled my COM2 port, and viola!, my IRQ was freed and COM1 got back its rightly deserved IRQ! Of course, I could have also plugged my modem to COM2 and that would have solved the issue. To check whether theres an IRQ conflict with the port your modem is using, just access Resources in the Properties of your port under Device Manager. See which device is conflicting and you may disable it if not needed. If you cannot or do not want to disable the conflicting device/port, then disable all unused devices to free up some resources. Btw, it may also help to check whether your modem is really plug n play compatible. Also, you may want to Toggle the option "Plug n Play aware OS" in your BIOS settings.

Here are the best programs: For good compression and fast speed: WinRAR (currently v3.50) For excellent compression and avg speed: 7-Zip For best compression and very slow speed: UHA / WinUHA (use PPM compression) Btw, no other compressor does 7z as best as 7-zip itself. I've tried PowerArchiver and others, but they seemed to be using older 7z routines. The new 7-zip better compresses to 7z archives.

IE7 only for WindowsUpdate. Firefox and Opera always And btw, IE7 WILL have tabs

I think what bledd and zxian are referring to is bad cookies. You can still get bad cookies thru firefox, which might compromise on your privacy. Also browsers aren't the only means of getting spyware. If you are using any program that connects to the net, there is a chance of getting spyware if the program uses the IE core. I do know a few p2p programs, dl managers show pages/ads thru IE. And its not just programs that connect to the net, but even programs that you install. Although bundled spyware has been now reduced to a minimal what with the Spyware Bill being introduced and all, but you do get a few programs that either install spyware or some adware components. Although literally the term 'spyware' refers to programs or software, even things like histories, cookies or anything privacy related now falls under that term. And just because you haven't gotten infected doesn't mean that you cannot get infected. If you look at Firefox's fixes, there were methods to install spyware or do stuff thru the fox. And it wasn't too long ago too. Now if someone were to exploit that, then you could have got infected. Its just because no one did exploit those bugs found that people are still relatively safe. For the informed user though, who likes to keep himself updated, its not much of an issue. The problem is with the less informed / casual user who doesn't update very often. I know some people who are still stuck with 0.9 versions of firefox! (not anymore though, I forced them to upgrade). This is what happened with the blaster worm. MS released a patch to the bug months before the attack. But Blaster did come, and leave a trail of destruction thanks to people who don't update...

In that case there are two things remaining: 1) Your ISP 2) Your hardware/motherboard itself For your hardware config problems,\ you can confirm that by connecting another computer (with its own modem) to the line and try running it thru the nite. Although I'd doubt though that your internal hardware would have anything to do with this. But this could be a problem with your ISP itself. What you can do is set the modem to disconnect sometime in the middle of the night, close the p2p programs, redial automatically and start the p2p program. You can easily make a .bat file that does that. You could perhaps set it to say, disconnect and redial every few hours. And btw, for cases when you need to reboot, you dont need to reboot at all. Just do a rasdial /disconnect to 'clean up, and disconnect' your line. If that alone doesn't help, you could disable and re-enable your modem. Or you may even remove your program from the modems list, and scan for hardware changes in device manager. And even if THAT doesn't help, then it doesn't hurt to have the comp automatically reboot after a while. Just put your p2p programs at the startup, drop in your dialup connection too into the startup, enable Auto Login so that XP will automatically log into your account after a reboot. That way your comp will automatically do the needful without any intervention needed. In case you want to do that ONLY after your connection goes dead, then you can make a script to repeatedly ping or download a page. Or you could make a script that checks the download speed in your p2p programs. When there is no ping, or the page cannot be downloaded, or the speed is 0.0k for some time, then your comp could do the 1) rasdial / disconnect, redial etc 2) Modem disable/remove with device manager refresh or 3) reboot, autologin, autodial, start p2p. Choose a method that works best for you. If you need any help with the above scripts, do let me know.

First of all, if you have any drive in the computer (floppy/cd), then you can say goodbye to XP's security. Its only WAY too easy to gain admin rights..plus you could delete stuff directly off the disks too without even needing an os. Even if you put in a BIOS password, it can easily be cracked by yet another program, like CMOSPWD (that dont even require a bootdisk). You dont need to be a rocket scientist to do all that. So its better that you dont do any of these so called 'restrictatory' measures as theres always a way to get past them. Rather you install some normal security software like ZoneAlarm and probably some privacy and encryption software (maybe PGP) and then have a 1-1 talk with him. Explain to him about the software and convince him that he is secure and theres no need to go paranoid.. All in his best interests.. etc

(deleted). Sorry, double post.

If anyone is interested in what I'm working on, it's a utility that adds a menu to the right click context menu to allow uploading of images to a couple hosts such as ImageShack. You can see it here. Just browse over to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell Add a new subkey say, "Upload to ImageShack", under that make another subkey called "command". Set the (Default) value to your executable. For eg, "C:\My Programs\uploader.exe" parameters "%1". And if you want to add something to all folders, then drop down to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell. Make a new subkey, say "Upload all files to ImageShack", make a "command" subkey and set the default value in the above format. Only %1 here would be replaced by the folder path. For paticular file formats, the method is exactly the same. Say you want to add this for a .jpeg, then head over to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\jpegfile\shell... and you know the rest.

sorry, I removed MSVCP71.dll (to reduce the size) cause its generally installed by most software; and many people also use DLL packs so this and other dlls are commonly installed. Just download msvcp71.dll and place it into your system32 folder.

Heres my program, ForceDelete. Just start it and try deleting any folder. When you get the 'cannot delete' message, ForceDelete will intercept the message and delete the folder for ya.

NTFS 5 has that feature built in. Its called as symbolic file linking or something like that. AFAIK, there is no command that lets you do this, but there are many freeware commandline programs that allow you to do that, but MS does provide the API functions. One such program that allows you to do that is FileLink 2.0.0 Also, make sure that the Distributive Link Tracking Service is enabled, so that your links don't become dead if the original source is changed.

First of all, from the other computer, run a chkdsk on your 1'st comps' drives (all partitions). Start -> Run -> chkdsk X: /F /V /X should do. (where X is the drive letter.) Do this for all the partitions of your 1st comps' drive. Next, convert the filesystem by using the command convert X: /FS:NTFS, where X is the drive letter of the partition you want to convert.

If you guys haven't been around back then, heres how I think the browsers evolved: WorldWideWeb (Was a program; renamed Nexus, 1990) | ViolaWWW (Based on Nexus) | NCSA Mosaic (Based on Viola) | End of Mosaic -> Most of the codebase -> Internet Explorer | Mosaic Communications Set Up -> Internal Codename "Mozilla" -> Netscape born -> Netscape 1,2,3,4 -> Mozilla (Open Source, based on N4) Mozilla (Open source) -> Netscape (6,7) | Firefox | & other Gecko browsers Firefox -> Netscape 8+

For those who don't want to download the full >10MB virus definitions update (to integrate into the install): > Just perform an ordinary LiveUpdate. After updating, check your %ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Symantec Shared\VirusDefs\ folder. You'll find folders containing entire VirusDefs in the format YYYYMMDD.###. Just go to the latest folder, select all files and zip it up. Name it VDefHub.zip > Do not compress the VDefHub.zip. ie, set the compression level to Store. You should be getting a file about >=17 MB. This will allow 7zip and other compressors to better compress the entire package, and you'd be saving a few MB's. > To further reduce the size of your package, remove unneeded dlls from the SAV\System32 folder. You can straightaway delete ctl3d32.dll, msvcp71.dll and msvcr71.dll. mfc71.dll may be safe to delete too, as many programs install this. You can also delete the DLLs present in \System32\Redist\MS\System if you don't plan to install on a Win 9x system.

It doesn't matter if you do C: or not. The fact is that you'd be combining all your drives into dynamic disks, which make them dependent on each other. And since RAID0 doesn't offer any redudancy, any failure of a drive would mean a complete loss of data. Drives/Volumes/Partitions etc dont make sense anymore. Personally though, I've been running on software raid since the past 5 years, and my drives (2x40GB Seagate) haven't crashed till now (touchwood). But maybe its because I run them 24x7... Btw, you may also want to use a S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring tool like Active SMART to keep a check on your drive's health and temp. Also make sure that you got proper ventilation in your cabinet so that your drives dont heat up. And you also need to take that extra care so that you prevent drive crashes. Things like having a good UPS (Even if you have good power supply), making sure that your cabinet is kept on a sturdy base and not subjected to jerks, regular CHKDSKS, Defrags and SpinRite's go a long way in maintaining your drive.

Try a vitual machine. Install a known safe XP (say, ur original XP CD) into the virtual machine. Then do whatever you want to within the virtual machine. After making the final ISO, just copy it back to your real comp and burn it. Thats just about as safe as you can be..

Operating System: XP Pro SP2 // QNX RTOS // Fedora Connection Optimizer: Cablenut, Dr Salman's HyperNet Instant Messaging: Yahoo!, MSN and Gilly Messenger Download Manager: Getright Pro, FlashGet Web Accelerator: Onspeed IM Enhacements: Messenger Plus!, Spleak, YEmote RSS Aggregator: Opera Web Servers: Ability FTP Server, Abyss Web Server Web Browser: Opera, Firefox, Arachne Ad-Blocker: Ad Muncher Firewall: ZoneAlarm Pro E-Mail: M2 (Opera) Proxy: Naviscope P2P: eMule FTP: FlashFXP IRC: miRC Virus Removal Tool (standalone): scan.exe/scanpm.exe (McAfee SuperDAT) Anti-Spyware: Spybot S&D, Ad-Aware SE, HijackThis, CWShredder, SpywareBlaster Anti-Virus: Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition Imaging: Jasc Paint Shop Pro, The GIMP, MsPaint Animation: Animation Shop Pro Image Viewer: Irfan View Icon Editing: IconWorkshop Screen Capture: SnagIt Word Processing: Notepad2, OpenOffice.org PDF Reader: Adobe Acrobat Database: Oracle Bundler: Pe-Bundle Debugging: OllyDBG Programming: Visual Basic, Visual C++, TASM Hex Editing: WinHex PE Analysis: PE Explorer, PEiD Setup Creator: NSIS Resource Editor: Resource Hacker, ResEdit, Restorator Scripting & Automation: AutoHotKey, Batch Files Web Development: Frontpage, Notepad2, DHTML Menu Builder HTML Compression: HTML LZW Pro, HTML Compress HTML Source Viewing: Instant Source Defrag: Diskeeper Backup: WinRescueXP Undelete: Winternals FileRestore RAM Drive: RamdiskXP S.M.A.R.T: Active SMART CPU Cooling: CPU Eat 'n' Cool Compression: 7-zip, WinRAR, WinUHA, UPX Overclocking: SoftFSB Partitioning: Symantec Partition Magic Disk Imaging: WinImage, Norton Ghost Disk Cleaner: System Mechanic Data Recovery: GetDataBack for NTFS, SpinRite Desktop Search: File Finder (jv16 Powertools) Driver Manager: Driver Magic Pro Registry cleaner: Regseeker Registry Compress: WinRescueXP Disk Usage Viewer: Sequoia View Magnetic Media Repair/Refresh: SpinRite Boot-CD: BCDW, EasyBoot, PeBuilder CD Cloning: Clone CD CD Recovery: IsoBuster DVD Cloning: Slysoft AnyDVD + DVD X Studios CloneDVD Virtual Drive: Daemon Tools CD/DVD Burning: Nero CD Image Authoring/editing: UltraISO Audio Codec: HE-AAC Audio Player: foobar2000 Audio Editor: GoldWave Audio Ripper: Easy CD-DA Extractor Audio Create: Fruity Loops, Dance eJay Lyrics viewer: EvilLyrics Audio Capture: Total Recorder Audio Converter: dbPowerAmp Movie Player: Media Player Classic, DVD Player: WinDVD Movie Codec: DivX Movie Converter: #1 Video Converter, Xilisoft Video Converter Movie Editor/etc: VirtualDub, Windows Movie Maker, MPEG Tools Movie Ripper: Dr. DivX, #1 DVD Ripper Movie/Disk Catalog: Ant Movie Catalog Skinning: Stardock Suite System Tweaking: [deXter]'s Super XP AutoTweaker Theme Pack Program: XPize XP Setup Customization, etc: nLite Password/System Auditing: L0pht Crack (LC), Cain, Ethereal, Passware Window/Message Spying: Winspector Spy Traceroute: NeoTrace Pro CMOS Password Cracking: CMOSPWD Offline NT Registry/User Accounts Editor: CHNTPW Mobile phone Software: Oxygen Phone Manager Notepad Replacement: Notepad2 Astronomy Related: Stella, Earthview Answering Machine: Advanced Call Center, Modem Spy MSI Editor: WinInstall Hotkeys: AutoHotKey OCR: Abby FineReader DOS: FreeDOS Virtual Machine: MS Virtual PC, VMware Workstation DOS Emulator: DosBOX PSX Emulator: ePSXe, PCSX2 NTFS-DOS: NTFSDOS Pro System ClockSpeed Modifier: SpeederXP Process Viewer: Sysinternals ProceXP, Advanced Process Manager Startup Viewer: Sysinternals Autoruns Boot Manager: BootMagic Diagnostics: Everest Home Edition Games: Diablo II LOD, Ragnarok Online, Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth, Star Trek Armada, Age Of Empires 2, Rise of Nations, One Must Fall 2097, Bio Menace *P.S: I didn't add any software versions 'cause I update every 12 hours

Just to let you guys know, Active Sync 4.0 is already out