lurk&jerk

Hello. I'm trying to elminate drives here. Evidently, no one who is responding to this post has XP. Otherwise they'd see what I'm talking about. I know the Send to folder is nested in the Profiles diretory. But in XP the actual sendto folder does not contain hard drives. However the Sendto menu DOES. I'm trying to figure out what mechanism populates the menu with the drives so I can get rid of them and make my menu less cumbersome. Please see this thread: http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/1087569389

I'm pretty sure that Win2k and Win 98 are different. In XP, the CD and floppy (if you have one) appear in teh sendto menu and the menu cannot be organized aphabetically, like it could in Windows 98. If you install sata drivers and your hard drive has logical drives, then XP populates the sendto menu with all those drives, and, again, they don't appear in the user profile. That's what I'm trying to hack.

Drives are not editable. They don't appear as shortcuts in the Sendto folder. Try to loose ythe floppy drive in your sendto menu if you have a floppy drive installed. You can't do it. There's no short cut.

When using nvidia or other special sata drivers. It populates sendto menu with all my logical drives whereas MS standard drivers don't. I'd also like to get rid of the floppy drive in send to. I'm even up for disabling sendto altogether and create and equivalent new folder witih sendto functionality. (The only things I really use frequently are sendto clipboard, sendto desktop and sendto mail.)

I nlited 2000. Must have been some core files removed. But it was pretty much complete except for the documents. I'll re-burn.

At least on my install, it won't launch.

Like I said, this is a clean install. On opening and exiting the program I get the error when clicking on the uncompressed file WPI.hta. This may be a partition error, though. So I'll investigate that for the time being.

it complains about this WPI.hta line (character "2"): if (!FileExists(optionsFile)) //No argument or invalid file Anybody know how to fix it. I have a useroptions.js file. Is there another file it is complaining about?

In the Ultimate theme they start too far to the left. I want to move them to the right. I tried increasing screen size but that didn't work. Right now the program lisings are crowding the options/selection text.

Interesting software but it does not give any additional information other than to say it can't copy the affected files.

It's an external 2.5" hard drive, if that makes a difference. But I've had this problem with USB sticks too. I'm using Explorer to copy files.

Thanks everyone for your help!

ok. Thanks. One other quick question: I don't see any reference to this in any of the .htm files. How do I get rid of the "Exit" text next to the exit button. I see a reference to "WPI 5.3" which is displayed on the right hand side, but no reference to Exit on the left hand side....

What file do I edit to nudge the "Begin Install" and "Selections:" fields a little lower to put it in the middle, as opposed to the top, of the left hand colum? Shown here.

Not running any anti-virus. The three files mentioned were downloaded from the same source, but from a different machine...

I've researched this all over the Net & no one seems to have a solution, blaming everyting from bad cd-rom media, to bad disks to excessively long file names. In my case this happens when one drive is formatted in NTFS and the drive I'm copying from is formatted in FAT32. My guess is that the inability to copy files is related to the security streams in NTFS or file incompatibility. For example, I can't copy the windows 2003 service pack from FAT32 to the NTFS drive, but XP SP and Windows 2000 SP copy just fine. If both drives are formatted in FAT32 I don't have this problem so I suspect this must be some kind of permission's issue. Anybody got a fix, the permissions are now set so that "everyone" has full control of the file. I tried adding administrator and it makes no difference.

That was my original point Mhz. Glad someone figured it out. I'll consider the case closed now...

I don't know how a simple suggestion to include directory switches, took such a left turn. But the beauty about PC's is that you can build them and install software on them, pretty much any way you want. Was there something about ther "personal" in computer that I missed...

With the exception of Acrobat and compression utilities, I always segregate Windows from my applications. I also keep my Windows desktop folder, sendto and start menu on a separate partition as well. There are a myraiad of reasons. 1. Script kiddies often assume you put programs in the Program Files folders and write trojans and other malware accordingly. 2. May programs don't require a setup program. So if Windows crashes and your programs are on a separate partition, you just reinstall the OS and you're up and running with a fair number of apps that don't require a full installation. 3. You can more rapidly defragment your OS drive if it isn't choked with GBs of apps that aren't essential to the OS. 4. Likewise, you can backup or image your OS much faster if it isn't chocked with GB of apps. Most major install programs allow you to choose a directory, either with the /D= or /Dir= swithch. I thought i would encourage folks that come accoss some of the more unusual directory switches to share their findings with the MSFN community.

Is it OK to say that in posting silent switches, people include the directory switch? Not all of us like to put apps in the %program files% directory. Thanks.

I've been plugging away at WPI for a month now and really like the flexibility of the post install method of setting up Windows. A side benefit of this program is that it really helps you get organized about your installations and weed out crap you don't need and focus on the stuff you do as well as make installations more consistent from machine to machine if you have a home or small office network. Just thought I'd share some of my findings in the hope that they might benefit others: 1. The %CDROM% path designation was giving me fits since on my machine Windows could never find WPI.hta on a mobile or USB drive. I switched to using %wpipath% (as discussed here and haven't had any problems since. 2. Intitially, after using nLite to issue a runonce command to start WPI.hta after a Windows install, WPI.hta wouldn't launch. I solved the problem by inserting a pause (or hit any key command) before WPI.hta is launched. Now it works just fine. 3. In the WPI\INSTALL folder, I use silent switches on a single executable file or let my favorite compression utility do the heavy lifting of copying files and making registration entries by bundeling it all up in an SFX file. (I do this with even big apps like Microsoft Office and Acrobat and it works). I don't use nested installation folders with "setup.exe" and a bunch of files within the WPI install folder because WPI will sometimes get confused. 4. The executables of some apps have a lot of flab in them and make your installation DVD larger than it needs to be. Always right-click on the installation file with your zip program and see if the files can be extracted. When I did this with the program DVD Copy 4, for example, I found the executable added nearly 25MB of additional code by bundling QuickTime, GoogleToolBar and GoogleDeskTop Search in the setup file. To make this easier, download the executable identifier PEid as well as the universal silent switch finder . Put a shortcut to USSF.exe in your sendto folder and right-click on any executable to determine what installer was used in the setup program. it will show you the switches that will make the setup install automatically. 5. Since it is so useful for running scripts, I usually bundle AutoIt directly into the initial Windows install with nlite. Then, the first post install app I setup is an uninstaller program so it can track all the setups reliably and remove anything that went astray or that I subsequently don't want. I also use the uninstaller on apps like Crap Cleaner to remove any 3rd party apps that are automatically installed when you run a silent setup. For instance after Crap Cleaner I run a script that invokes the uninstallation program to remove the yahoo toolbar. 5. Finally, I make an all-in-one switchless installer for my custom tweaks and small utilities. I usually copy at least the following registry keys: 1. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer (for file settings like hide/show attributes, etc. Icon Layout) 2. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\ComDlg32\PlacesBar 3. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CLSID (for custom namespaces and icons, i.e. "Trash" instead of "Recycle Bin"; "My PC" instead of "My Computer". 4. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\IntelliPoint (for intellimouse settings) go here to get info on how to make a silent intellimouse setup. 5. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders (I move all my shell folders DESKTOP, WEB HISTORY, FAVORITES AND DOCUMENTS FOLDER to a seperate data partition on my hard drive; this is the registry key where you set the paths; you can also use TweakUI to set the paths but you need to copy the resulting registry changes to a file) 6. I use the Maxthon browser instead of Internet Explorer because customizing it is a snap. Just set the browser up like you want and copy the config.ini file to the \Program Files\Maxthon\Config folder during post install. I use the "Ultimate" WPI theme, which is very nice except for the smallish exit button, which I made larger. Here's a pix . of some of my WIP directory structure and here is my config.js file.config.js. Here is a screen shot of the embedded commands for my tweaks SFX file. . Newbies, please remember the scripts are just guides and not meant for copying and pasting. Your apps would have to match to same paths and files names as the ones in my file in order for them to run correctly. That's all for now....

Anybody know where intellimouse stores its settings? Registry search doesn't turn up anything when looking for point32.exe or IntelliMouse...

My apologies. I read that before I made this post but didn't think it applied to my situation. I guess I need to try it. Thanks.

...after Windows xp is instlaled. Maybe because WPI.hta is not an executable. I can make one with autoit. But what would the command line be?

Yes, edmoncu's script works. Outpost gives an error message when you first start it up. But just dismiss the window. However, the registration code entry didn't work for me. I'm going to try the regedit /s command to write the entire Outpost registry entries, not just the registration number, and see if that solves the problem.