hosebeast

No, you cannot disable these folders completely, not even by replacing explorer.exe. You see, explorer.exe by itself is not the entire shell. It mainly manages the desktop, and it does so by invoking many different dll files which provide various pieces of shell functionality to all Win32 apps. This is what is meant by "API" (Application Programming Interface). Specifically, there is a widely-used API function named SHGetFolderPath (actually a group of similar functions, but I am simplifying here). Applications written for the Win32 API assume they can call SHGetFolderPath using the CSIDL_PERSONAL parameter to determine the path to the user's "My Documents" folder. There are other parameters available for Favorites, My Music, My Video, Shared Documents, etc. Even though you could blow away your "My Documents" folder and you could even delete the registry keys which defined its location, as soon as you run an application which calls this API, Windows will automatically recreate the keys and folder so that it can pass a valid result back to the application. Naturally, explorer.exe is a heavy caller of this API but so is virtually everything else you might want to run, from Notepad to Firefox to iTunes to Adobe Reader and so on. Even if you try to stick with text-only programs, many text-only programs for Win32 are written for the Console Mode API (as opposed to being real-mode DOS programs) and some of those may call SHGetFolderPath in certain situations. So the only foolproof way of getting rid of My Documents is to limit yourself to real-mode DOS programs. In which case you might as well get rid of Windows completely and run those programs on real DOS.

HP is an SLP OEM. This means their versions of Windows XP have their Product Activation tied to their BIOS. SLP stands for System Lock Protection, and all the large OEMs use it. SLP is implemented by 2 custom files: i386\setupp.ini and i386\setupreg.hiv. The only legal way to get the non-HP versions of these files is to purchase a new copy of Windows XP. Even though you could use the HP version to make a bootable CD which will install on other hardware, you won't be able to activate it, so it will stop working after 30 days. All OEM copies of Windows are explicitly licensed for the hardware they came with; OEM licenses are never transferable. This applies to every single OEM SKU of Windows XP, worldwide with no exceptions. Only FPP (retail) SKUs are transferable and only after the OS is removed from the original machine before transfer to a new machine. Furthermore, some OEMs customize the device drivers built into their versions of XP. Most of the time, they are merely adding devices to Microsoft's base, but in some cases they can effectively remove or disable generic devices which might otherwise interfere with proper PnP detection and resource allocation of their devices. If you find a file named i386\nt5inf.cat in addition to i386\nt5inf.ca_ (or instead of the .ca_ version) then your disc has been customized in terms of device drivers and may not work well on other hardware.

First, there is no such section as [COMMANDS] in WINNT.SIF. That section name is only valid for cmdlines.txt; you need to use [GuiRunOnce] in WINNT.SIF. Second, why are you specifying AutoPartition=0? According to the docs, if you don't want AutoPartition=1 then you need to leave the AutoPartition parameter out completely. Don't confuse AutoPartition under [Data] with Repartition under [unattended]. Many people mistakenly assume that AutoPartition has something to do with creating partitions. It only controls how Setup chooses a partition for installation. Lastly, have you determined that your WINNT.SIF is getting picked up at all? For example, does the resolution get set to 1024x768 automatically? If not, you may have accidentally saved your WINNT.SIF file in Unicode, or maybe you've got file extensions hidden and accidentally saved it as WINNT.SIF.TXT without noticing.

Is your RIS server multi-homed? (either multiple NICs with TCP/IP bound to them, or a single NIC with multiple IP addresses bound to it on the same subnet) If so, that's no supported for RIS. Also, check to make sure your client NICs have different MAC addresses. I've seen brand new cheap NICs which came with the same MAC address, and I've seen NICs where people have doctored the MAC address for various reasons.

In your Folder List pane (on the left hand side), right-click on the IMAP account and choose "IMAP Folders..." At this point, you can do either one of the following: 1. Click the Query button. This will show all the folders available on the server. Highlight the ones you want to be visible to IMAP clients and click Subscribe. This will affect any IMAP client you use from anywhere on the Internet, not just Outlook and not just on your current PC. 2. Uncheck the checkbox labelled "When displaying hierarchy in Outlook, show only subscribed folders." This is near the bottom of the dialog. By unchecking this, Outlook will always show all the server folders, but this setting only affects Outlook on your current PC.

Let's not assume right away that the original poster was asking how to do it illegally. People are often confused by whether the XP Pro Upgrade package is just for upgrading from older versions of Windows or whether it can upgrade from Home Edition. They also commonly ask how the upgrade process works, in terms of preserving their existing programs and data. To upgrade from XP Home to XP Pro, you purchase the same XP Pro Upgrade package that you would purchase if you were upgrading from Windows 2000, Windows ME, etc. To preserve your existing programs and data, launch the installation while booted into your current XP Home. In other words, do not boot from the XP Pro CD. If you boot from the CD, your only choices will be to install a fresh copy of XP in a new directory or to overwrite your existing copy completely (wiping out your current registry). By launching the install from within your current Windows, it will do an in-place upgrade. When prompted for your Product Key, you will enter the new one which came with your Pro CD. By the way, the technique which circulated on the web a couple of years ago for hacking Home into Pro was lame. First of all, it can't be done to an existing installation of Home; it was a hack to the Home CD which required you to reinstall. Second, even though it activated a few Pro features like domain membership and Remote Desktop, you were still missing a bunch of Pro-only commands and utilities (for example, schtasks.exe which provides command-line access to Scheduled Tasks) because they simply don't exist on the Home CD. If you compare a Home CD and a Pro CD, the Pro CD has 23MB more files. Obviously, you cannot simply hack a few settings and get 23MB to appear out of thin air. Lastly, service packs refuse to install on the hacked Home-Pro.

Also check out BufferZone at Trustware.com

No, when you launch Office 2003 for the first time in a given user profile (meaning for each Windows user account), it prompts you for your name and initials. It then stores them in the UserName and UserInitials entries under: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\UserInfo These 2 entries are in REG_BINARY format due to Unicode. Therefore, you have to be careful when editing in regedit. Even if you installed Office unattended, it will still prompt for user name when first launched in a given user profile (assuming you used a Microsoft-supported method of unattended install, such as GPO; if you used 3rd party tools, then that might explain how you wound up with Administrator in everybody's profile).

You don't need Acrobat Professional; you can use Acrobat Standard or even Acrobat Elements (which costs less than $30). Installing the free Adobe Reader 7.0 will enable Thumbnail View in Windows Explorer for certain PDF files. They must meet these 2 conditions: 1. The PDF format must be version 1.5 or higher which basically means the file must be saved by Acrobat 6.0 or higher. As far as I know, all current competitors (including every freeware program which can create PDF files today) conform to version 1.4 or earlier of the PDF format. 2. The PDF must have been saved with the "embedded page thumbnails" option. This option is available in Acrobat. There is also a freeware program from CoolPDF which can add embedded page thumbnails but it's pointless to run it on a PDF unless the PDF meets the condition above (version 1.5 or higher). For PDF files which do not meet these conditions, you need to buy at least Acrobat Elements. PSD files are fairly easy to render a thumbnail of. That's why you can get a simple DLL to handle it. PDF files require a Postscript rendering engine. Even though Adobe's actual shell extension may look small, it makes calls into other DLLs which add up to many megs of code. Something to consider: Do you really need thumbnails in Windows Explorer? Or do you really just want to something which can browse PDF files as thumbnails? If the latter, then try XnView. It has a PDF plug-in which handles thumbnails. You need to download and install Ghostscript separately because the XnView plug-in depends upon Ghostscript as its Postscript rendering engine.

Computer settings are not static. I think you are not understanding the difference between Computer Configuration settings (the top portion in Group Policy Editor, essentially affecting HKLM) and User Configuration settings (the bottom portion, essentially affecting HKCU which is stored in your domain user profile). There is no such setting as "disable floppy/CD" so I assume you are talking about the settings which really just hide drives from Windows Explorer and common dialogs such as File Open. These settings are User Configuration. Therefore, they affect your domain user profile, not the machine's registry (meaning HKLM). When you link GPO to an OU containing computer accounts, this by itself only applies Computer Configuration settings to those machines. In order to apply User Configuration settings to users who log onto those machines, the GPO must have Security Filtering defined which includes those users. When you create a new GPO, by default the Security Filtering includes "Authenticated Users" which means any domain user, regardless of OU. You can see the Security Filtering on the Scope tab in the Group Policy Management Console. You could also enable Group Policy Loopback Mode, which applies User Configuration to any user who logs onto the computer, but no matter how you do it, the User Configuration settings get written to the user profile. What happened to you is that you moved the computer out of the OU, which resets the HKLM-related settings, and stops applying GPO to your user profile upon future logons, but it does not reset the values which were already saved in your user profile. The only way to reset an existing user profile back to default is to delete the user profile and let it get recreated from the Default User profile upon next logon. Your workaround of applying another GPO does not actually "reset" everything; it only changes the specific settings to whatever you indicate in the second GPO.

You need to have a PDF shell extension installed which renders the thumbnail for Explorer. Many Adobe products, including the free Reader, automatically install such a shell extension, but the various versions work slightly differently. For example, all versions fail to render the thumbnail if the PDF is password-protected for reading (which is logical) but some versions refuse to render the thumbnail even if the PDF is only password-protected against editing. There are some versions which make an exception for PDF files which have been saved with embedded thumbnails (so they don't have to render on the fly) but this would never be true with older PDFs because embedded thumbnails are only supported by newer revisions of the PDF file format. Also note that if you have multiple Adobe products installed from different generations (for example: Acrobat 6.0 with Reader 7.0 and Illustrator CS2 with Photoshop CS), conflicts can cause the shell extension to break, which could stop thumbnails from displaying even if the programs otherwise seem to work fine.

To join the domain, your WINNT.SIF file should have an [identification] section with something like this: JoinDomain=YOURDOMAIN CreateComputerAccountInDomain=Yes DomainAdmin=YOURDOMAIN\Administrator DomainAdminPassword=Your-Password This covers CD-based installs where you simply want the computer to wind up in the default Computers container. If you need to place the computer in a specific Active Directory Organizational Unit, check out the MachineObjectOU option. If you use RIS and/or prestage your computer accounts, you would want to use CreateComputerAccountInDomain=No and DoOldStyleDomainJoin=Yes. The AutoLogon feature of WINNT.SIF only supports local accounts, not domain accounts. If you want your unattended install to automatically logon as a domain account, you need to have it first logon as the local Administrator and set the necessary registry values under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon then reboot. This is done with the [GuiUnattended] section by setting AutoLogon=Yes and AutoLogonCount=1. Do not use the EncryptedAdminPassword option in this section because AutoLogon will not work. (This is not well documented.) Then in [GuiRunOnce], you can either add the commands to update the registry and reboot, or you can execute a batch file which contains those commands. If you've already got a batch file being run from GuiRunOnce, you may want to simply add the commands to it. To update the registry, you can either prepare a REG file and use REGEDIT /S to merge it, or you can use REG ADD /F to set the values directly. If you need help with the details of the registry values, search for AutoAdminLogon. To reboot at the end, use SHUTDOWN -R -F (which you may already have if you're already doing stuff in a GuiRunOnce batch file).

I knew they were different but why do you say they are incompatible? I have an XP Pro VM running in Workstation 5.5.1 which I upgraded from Tools 19175 (the latest build from Workstation 5.5.1) to 24927 (the build which comes with Server 1.0 RC1) and everything seems to be working fine under Workstation 5.5.1. The service starts, mouse capture/release is automatic, all features of the tray icon works, no errors are logged in the Event Log, nothing looks unusual at all.

You're getting dotnetfx.exe and netfx.msi confused. Bottom line is that netfx.msi must be located in a writable path. When you run dotnetfx.exe from CD (or from anywhere) it automatically extracts netfx.msi to your TEMP path which should always be writable. So whenever you're talking about dotnetfx.exe, it doesn't matter where you launch it from. Dotnetfx.exe is not the actual installer; it's merely an IExpress wrapper for netfx.msi which must run from hard disk. If you pre-extract netfx.msi and burn it to CD/DVD, you cannot install it directly from there. You have to copy netfx.msi to hard disk yourself (or let the \$OEM\$1 thing take care of it, in the case of Unattended Setup or RIS).