CoffeeFiend

That's odd, because that's exactly how I checked (not installing WGA, and disabling NIC), and it's worked perfectly every single time (had no problems on physical machines either). No WGA fails at all (but I got that error with EVERY single other installer though). I'm using Win2003 R2 Standard VLK though (WGA spyware NOT installed), so XP might behave differently. Might have to look into that one a bit further... Edit: Just had a quick peek, the extracted packages won't integrate merely because the _SFX_CAB_EXE_PATH and _SFX_CAB_EXE_PACKAGE environment variables aren't set (that might be "fixable"). That would solve the problem in an elegant way (already integrated, versus installer that only works half the time). They have to be set to the right thing, otherwise update.exe complains it can't find the destination directory (wrong error message). Setting them to what seems like the right values (_SFX_CAB_EXE_PATH to the directory where the SFX update is located, and _SFX_CAB_EXE_PACKAGE to the SFX update filename) leads to another error message (An error occured while attempting to integrate this software update package. Verify that the architecture, language, and service pack levels of this software update are valid for the target distribution folder), as seemingly it can't get information about my (very standard) build for no reason ("GetBuildInformation: Error 0x3 while trying to retrieve target OS version information from j:\build\i386\." and "GetTargetOSInformation: Error retrieving build information: GLE = 0x3"). BTW, there is also a _SFX_CAB_EXE_PARAMETERS env var which can be set. Also, update packages are digitally signed, and maybe it checks it (there is code there to do so at least) I also tried replacing package installer (update.exe) with other versions just for fun, and I've also tried the /s switch (same as /integrate really) - still no go. Side note: All the update.exe always had the integrate switch, it's only iesetup.exe that doesn't have it (the main installer which gets launched by the SFX), so likely the integrate code for that is missing altogether (older installers seemingly don't have it either - at least not beta3, so not an option). Worst case scenario we might be able to "manually" integrate it from the inf files. Having looked at the idndl.exe/nlsdl.exe/xmllitesetup.exe packages so far, there seems to be nothing out of the ordinary (but then gain, maybe the main one is special) Edit2: Well. Too f'n bad. Screw IE7. It's a crappy browser anyways, and definitely not worth that much hassle. If someone manages to make a integrator of some kind, I might reconsider. Until then, I'll be IE7 free. Like I needed a reason not to use that POS...

You're blaming innocent folks for no reason here. MS didn't copy really firefox for tabs. Basically every browser out there has tabs, firefox wasn't anywhere near being the first (nor was opera). Why would it be FF's fault for Redmond's bad choices? As for the target="_blank" behavior, there is NO reason to blame FF for that either (the IE team makes the browser do what the hell they want it to - their own fault if they copy anyone's bad ideas, and no one else's), and if you don't like the default behavior, at least using FF you can fix it (or you can have the browser let you know before you click that it is one such link instead). Edit: seemingly, that behavior has been "fixed" in FF 2! You're putting an awful lot of unjustified blame on FF for absolutely no reason. The IE team is very capable of royally screwing things up by themselves, they've proven it time and time again And as for downloading part of the install, it does that even if you ise IEAK. There is no good reason not to include this by default, forcing us to slowly re-find/download/apply new stuff every single time on every PC (easily takes as long as the IE install itself). Internet connection or not, I think it's stupid. Had firefox packed 95% of their browser and force you to download the other 5% upon install, you'd have been blaming them again?

So it's not just spam, it's actually a 419... I thought they were only gathering addresses. I had never seen that one before, but it looks like you're not the only one.

I tought I was the last person into CRTs on earth LCDs often have poor resolutions, and they look god awful at anything else than that. Contrast is poor, angle of view often sucks, brightness/color rendition is often far from ideal - given some sunlight or high ambient light you can't see anything on most, response times, etc. They look like crap if not using DVI (and that would require me to buy 2 new KVM switches and a couple video cards - not to mention the laptop which has no DVI plug). Not to mention dead/stuck pixels. And nice large LCDs are still expensive. The 19"s have come down in price, but the 21"+ still aren't cheap (and I'm NOT going down in size or resolution). I'm not too sure on how reliable they are either (especially the backlights - whose replacement parts seem to not be available for long) The ONLY LCDs I've seen that didn't look awful were the Dell Ultrasharps. I had considered buying the 30", but it need special video cards (dual link DVI) in all my PCs, which is seemingly unswitchable using a normal KVM, and likely wouldn't work at all for other things (like the laptop with VGA only). I might buy a pair of 24" ultrasharps eventually, but there's no rush (the day one of my monitors die likely).

You'd be far better off using a VPN. I sure wouldn't want to let anyone on the internet (hackers) access to TS/VNC, you know they'll be trying dictionnary attacks against it and such. And with VPN, you have full network connectitivity (just like being connected locally), fully encrypted, without NAT or such.

Size is mostly irrelevant really. As long as: -it supports the formats I want -it has good compression ratios and decent speed -the GUI is not bad -preferably has decent shell integration -well priced Then perhaps, after all these, a very significant change in size/resource usage might matter, but they're FAR from being tie on all of the previous important points, so... I use winrar for the most part (mainly rar files and some zip files too), but I'm seeing more and more 7z files, so I'm using 7zip a bit. 7zip compression is nice, price is right and all, but I don't like their GUI too much (the icons make it look like an early Delphi app for win95 - even though I'm FAR from being a eye candy person), and the shell integration isn't as nice either (no extract to, and it's one sub-menu deep) IMO. (Never heard of tugzip, I'll have a look) Winzip's long been bloated useless junk IMO. Since day one it never did much more than pkzip did (except LFN support), cost as much as better archivers with more features/formats and better GUIs and all such as winrar, and regardless, it's the same old zip format (not overly great compression), which i've dropped as main archive format over 10 years ago (splitting zip files on floppies was a real PITA compared to using rar instead, you needed another app to make sfx'es, etc). Even if winzip was free, I still wouldn't want to use it.

I'm sorry, but I have absolutely NO idea what you mean by "without and type of design layouts". If you just want thumbnails w/o web pages at all (no links, just a bunch of thumbnails generated), then photoshop can still do this, or tons of other apps (there are even apps that do only that). But I'm not real sure what you want...

Yet, you wouldn't believe how much people fall for such stupid things. I remember one that said that Bill Gates would give a portion of his fortune or something to people who would forward an email. Nevermind that it would be a totally stupid thing for him to do. But I've seen mail servers brought to their knees because to much people (hundreds of them) forwarded that one message to hundreds more. The simple message (like 1 sentence) quickly grew over a MB with all the headers and stuff quoted (multiply that by a few thousand copies...) There are idiots out there falling for the simplest things. Just like spam is not going to end anytime soon, just because there's a bunch of idiots who buy junk from spam emails (diet pills or what not), making it profitable. As some already said, I propose we take warning labels off, and let the problem solve itself

That's definitely spam, no doubts about it. Hope you didn't email 'em or anything, in which case you'll have confirmed your email address is valid, and you'll be getting 100x more spam.

Being first idea or not is irrelevant. I don't see how anyone could even think this is a .NET framework wrapper for WinPE. The page very clearly described what it is (an AJAX lib - as the name implies too), and there's not even a mention of Win PE either. And if you've seen "several commercial wrappers", then I guess they're all mostly like that - unrelated stuff. I've NEVER seen one, and I did search. Then again, I doubt MS would let companies hack their framework and sell it (redistributing without license code that's been hacked to work and is likely somewhat unreliable and could make the system seem unstable damaging its reputation). So I don't see Redmond letting that happen in the first place. As for free ones, there is, and I've already linked to it (links and infos can be found on www.911cd.net) Anyways. Have a good vacation...

This has NOTHING to do with Win PE - whatsoever! It's an AJAX library a bit like MS' Atlas - soemthing for web servers. 100% unrelated.

There are countless ways to do this, the main 2 options being: 1-use some app that will generate thumbnails, usually along a gallery (static html pages) - like photoshop (look under file > automate >web photo gallery, at least in CS2), or a number of other apps that can do this 2-install and configure some kind of gallery package on your web server (whatever you like and that your server supports), such as coppermine, gallery or 4images, and drop your photos in there.

Unfortunately, I'm not going to add any to your list (although there are more), just some quick comments: MSI files are actually pretty easy to manipulate. It's some kind of custom database (yes, you can run SQL queries against it and all), but there's a standard API for it (pretty straightforward e.g. MsiOpenDatabase to open a msi file - and there's a C# wrapper out there), full docs on MSDN, there's a MSI SDK, etc. And there's a fair amount of tools for it (even some stuff on sourceforge). I think it's one of the best formats out there (easier to manipulate than the others at least). InstallShield wise, most of the tools out there are for very old versions like 6, when v11 is out... (that's one reason why I like msi - no need for extensive reverse engineering to peek inside like that) Also, there are some NSIS unpackers.

Well, it really depends what you need too - i.e. what server side tech you want/need (static html? php/mysql? asp.net/mssql? java/oracle? etc perhaps multicast if you want a "live" show, not just a "download only" version). And like some said, reliability and support varies GREATLY from one to another. Lots of little things can vary from one to another (different control panel, slightly different configs, etc). "Nicer" hosting packages often include extras too (more accounts, mailing lists, sometimes pre installed apps like forums/blogs/CMS'es/etc) Don't fall for the ridiculously too good looking deals. Things like "unlimited bandwidth" - as in, it's just so slow you couldn't ever use too much in the first place (or then again, perhaps half-decent speed, but you'll need to buy extra space at a premium price). TINSTAAFL. If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. If you just want some basic hosting, msfn hosting has pretty good pricing for what you get, and from what others say it sounds like they've got good service (I don't use them myself, so I can't say). I think you'd be hard pressed to find good service (on a similar plan) for much cheaper.

I tried the "infected" installer you uploaded. It's identical to the official one on the web site and the one I downloaded a while ago. I installed it, still no references of sudoku in registry, nor any spyware found... Your spyware's coming from elsewhere.

Uhmm. NO. Files and links on webpages don't get hijacked just like that. And I've NEVER heard of a hack being done to infect a download with spyware like that (and then the individual checking forums 24/7, and on the minute someone says anything, hacks the server again to restore the right files -- with the same timestamp no less). And if they wanted to get spyware spread, they wouldn't have picked nlite. It's relatively well known, but I doubt it's getting very much downloads (relatively speaking), and most of those are coming from users advanced enough to recognize and eradicate spyware, so it would be pointless. That theory makes NO sense whatsoever. And like I said before, the file's timestamp has NOT changed in over 3 weeks. NOTHING's changed! And I just compared the download with the one I downloaded nearly a month ago when there were news about it, and it's identical bit for bit. It's just him having spyware issues, and blaming them on nlite. Nothing more.

No, not AT ALL. I'm taking this rather seriously (the wrongful accusations). This is pure and simple libel. Check the Last-Modified date: Last-Modified: Mon, 02 Oct 2006 16:49:48 GMT So no, it hasn't changed in the last half hour, it's more than 3 weeks old. It's just your own spyware problems that did stop a half hour ago... That's the first such claim I ever see about nlite, and honestly, there's lots of knowledgeable ppl using it, you'd think we'd have figured it out already. nlite's not going to infect other ppl's computers, no matter what you say or think. It's as clean as it gets. @RyanVM: LOL. Been eBay'ing a bit much lately?

Same here. Picked the one you said, installed, ran spyware scanner (something I never bother with), and it found absolutely NOTHING at all. No "sudoku" anywhere in my registry either. Stop spreading lies! Don't take my word for it either: Not that I'm nlite user, but I figured that just couldn't be true. If you have spyware problems just ditch IE already, don't blame 'em on nlite.

Either that (the recommended way), or using a tweak I've already posted if you must absolutely use IE as an absolute last resort (right before being forced to use telnet instead)

I love FF too (although there's several other great browsers like Opera which I also use), but I've been holding on version 2 (the betas, and haven't installed the final even though it came out a little while ago), mainly because I'm not sure my favorite extensions are working on it yet. Within a week or so hopefully they'll all be available for it. I might backup my current profile and give it a try anyways.

Nah, not at the bottom of the window, but underneath it, to the right of the screen (the other buttons page, tool, print and such). And to be fair, he's right. It's very annoying to scroll all the way across the screen for that. And if you add buttons (like for fiddler or such), then they seemingly stay hidden, you have to click those 2 tiny arrows besides it for it to appear underneath. I'm not liking the GUI at all.

Why are you posting large BMPs on the web? Why not uncompressed TIFFs while you're at it? Try saving to PNG or GIF for such pics, just like LLXX said already.

Yeah. It wouldn't have to do that it's an insecure POS. Nor that CSS2 support (things like display:table, CSS opacity, etc) - an 8 1/2 year old standard is seriously lagging behind every other major browser. I wasn't expecting them to implement anything like 100% of the CSS2 specs or to even pass the ACID2 test (which nearly every other browser does nowadays), but they hardly improved CSS at all. Nor that they willingly didn't improve (chose not to) DOM 2 events support, even though it's the single and only browser I know of that doesn't support that, requiring IE-only code (nasty). Same goes for DOM 2 traversal-range and DOM 2 style support. This is not new stuff either (another W3C recommendation that's a several years old) Nor about their decision of not supporting win2k anymore, a bit early IMO (couldn't care less about win9x though), artificially forcing us (ppl who make web stuff) to support the IE6 atrocity for a while longer. Couldn't be because it just plain sucks either. Tons of things like on a failed postback, when you go back, often your post contents is gone (doesn't happen with other browsers). Or the borked zoom feature (the underline under the hyperlinks is off-centered, the space around 'em vanishes, etc - example and screenshots on request). Nor that they've put the menu bar (the file|edit|view... thing) under the address bar by default either (what a stupid move), being the very first windows app I've seen where it's not immediately under the title bar. It couldn't be because basically every other browser out there is more secure, has more features, is more standards compliant, supports more OS'es (not just windows either), have tons of useful extensions/addons which are not available on IE, that it has rendering issues on pages that work fine on other browsers (again e.g. slashdot.org), or that every person creating web content using standards has been struggling to get IE to display it right (what a PITA), or that it took MS 5 years to release such a POS update to their sucky browser, that they went out of their way to put WGA checks that make installation a pain for those who don't want that spyware on their systems (and removed the integration switch and all), that it took them so bloody long to have half-decent PNG support (a 11 year old format), that the sucky browser's been holding back the web, that installing IE7 breaks some applications, etc. In short, yeah, ppl just couldn't be "bashing" IE because it's the village id*** of browsers... They hardly improved anything, besides adding tabs and a backwards UI. Or perhaps we should rejoice that it just got support for the html4 abbr tag, finally, something every browser out there has been supporting for ages. After all, it's only dating back to '98, so it only took them 7 short years to implement that very basic feature. At that rate, we might have proper xhtml support (proper mime type) in 15 years (nevermind that by then every other browser will support things like XForms, SVG, etc) Yeah. We're "bashing" IE just because it's teh M$ - not because it DOES suck. (Nevermind I use and love basically all their other products, Windows, IIS, MS SQL, VS, Office, etc) IE is possibly the VERY WORST app MS has EVER made (FAR worse than WinME, but perhaps a tie with Bob)

Look under File -> Symbol File Path, or just ctrl-s, or the .sympath command. Then paste something like: SRV*c:\somewhere*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols (replace that "somewhere" part for whatever place you want your symbol local cache to be). The 2nd part is MS' symbol server's URL (it'll pull the required symbols as needed from it, instead of you having to install a bunch of large symbol packages for each OS/SP targeted) If you use windbg or kd often enough, you might want to set the _NT_SYMBOL_PATH environment variable. Personally, as I use it a fair bit, I set it at the same time the debugging tools get installed unattended (they're just a standard msi file) via a reg tweak: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment] "_NT_SYMBOL_PATH"="SRV*c:\\somewhere*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols" Don't forget to change the path again! (yet another reg tweak I hadn't bothered sharing yet)