Mr Snrub

Running RTM, and is the USB device FAT-format? This KB article may apply, check the symptoms, cause & workaround sections: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=949073

No idea on the Sim City games sorry, not played those since the original one back in the last century (preferred Civ to Sim).

I have been using Vista Ultimate x64 on my main rig at home as my primary OS since beta 2 (just did a clean install at RTM) and I use it mostly for gaming.World of Warcraft I play for hours at a time, it performs excellently and is rock-solid in stability (I frequently alt-tab out to browse, check mail, etc. and back in again without any issues too), NWN2 I installed a few weeks ago and it wasn't as happy - graphics were a little choppy in the cutscenes, occasional crash to desktop during multiplayer games on the LAN. F.EA.R. worked brilliantly (love that game), for some reason the first expansion pack I had to disable shadows to stop it rendering garbage on the screen, but the second expansion pack worked perfectly on max settings again. Played the 64-bit Far Cry briefly - to be honest I tend to only notice the image quality improvement when shown side-by-side with the 32-bit version (the rendering goes a lot further into the distance). Half Life 2 goes natively into 64-bit - works fine, as did Episode 1. Bioshock, Civilization IV, Sam & Max Episode 1 I have installed and they work without hitches - as does a legacy game like Warcraft 3. Possible gotcha: - Some games use a 32-bit runtime kernel driver to implement their copy protection, these will fail to load on 64-bit Windows and so the copy protection check will fail (IIRC "Sacred" was one such game) As for noticing a difference, difficult to say - the fact that the OS is 64-bit will enable things like hardware DEP and give you kernel patch protection for a little extra stability & security but not really quantifiable differences. Remember that you cannot upgrade from 32-bit to 64-bit, you have to do a clean install. I was dual-booting with XP x64 during Vista's beta stage, but since RTM I have booted into it twice, maybe. My new right should arrive in a day or 2, and that will have Vista Ultimate x64 SP1 installed on it alone from clean, fairly similar to the spec you mentioned: Core 2 Duo E6850, 8GB RAM, GeForce 8800 GTS 512, 2x 250GB SATA2

Is this every logon, not just the first one after booting up? If it is just the first one after powering on, is it a reboot, or a return from sleep mode? Is this a wireless LAN by any chance?

Does the following registry value exist, and if so what is it set to? HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters\IRPStackSize (Don't worry if it does not exist, it will have a default value.) Could you drill down to the following registry key and let us know the values and what they are set to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management (It is probably easiest to export the key to a .reg file, then open it with Notepad to paste it here.) cluberti mentioned desktop heap earlier, there is a tool to help see what is using it: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en This occurs for almost any service you try to start after booting up? Which services do start successfully?

http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsVista...3.mspx?mfr=true

It seems you are running version 9, and from a glance at Omnipage's manufacter website the latest version appears to be 16 - this specifically states Windows Vista support. http://www.nuance.com/omnipage/professional/ However, they appear to have a blanket statement that they do not intend to provide Vista compatibility to their product before version 15: http://www.nuance.com/vista/omnipage/upgrade/ You can always ask them, though.

This would imply that the browsers are using a transparent web proxy... AOL use a big farm of proxy servers that all their users are dumped behind IIRC... Possibly not an issue if it's not a DNS problem... but just for completeness it might be an idea to create a test user and see if they have the same issue. As both the XP and Vista clients are unable to resolve the IPv4 address, it's not a HOSTS or DNS problem, so you can skip that Are the XP clients using IE7? If the IPv6 disabling leads nowhere, we can look at using HTTP Fiddler to see what is different between the working and non-working clients: http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler/

Do you by any chance have OmniPage Pro installed?ophook32.dll appears to be a 3rd party module... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/275470 Exception code 0xc0000005 would indicate an access violation. If you don't think you have this installed, search for ophook32.dll on your boot drive... Open an elevated command prompt (right-click Command Prompt, click "Run as Administrator") and enter the following commands: CD \ DIR OPHOOK32.DLL /s That should report any locations where this module resides, the path might give a clue as to what it is part of.

OEM differs from Retail in 2 ways: - it is tied to the mainboard, so a mainboard replacement means a new license (unless replacing like-for-like due to hardware failure) - you are not entitled to technical support from Microsoft, the OEM (you, in this case) provides this You can activate as often as you like on the same hardware, but eventually you'll hit a threshold and automatic activation will fail and require you to go through the phone method. The "phone to activate" scenario also applies if too many hardware components are changed, or reported differently by the BIOS in some cases. The Retail version permits you to transfer your license to a new system if you upgrade, so depending on the frequency that you do this, and whether you are able to provide yourself technical support, it may work out cheaper to buy OEM.

I would start with empirical tests...ping my.axa.co.uk on working machine - not to see if ping works, but to see what IPv4 address it resolves to. Now ping the same address on the non-working machine - is it the same address? If not, check out HOSTS and differences in DNS client settings. If they are the same address, does the problem happen for every user logged onto the Vista machine? i.e. determine if this is a user or machine issue

That sounds like a fairly reasonable throughput for a 100Mbps network to be honest. 100Mbps = 100,000,000 bits/sec 100,000,000 bits / 8 = 12,500,000 bytes/sec = 12.5 MB/s 12,500,000 / 1,024 / 1,024 = 11.9 MiB/s This is theoretical maximum throughput, then there is the overhead of breaking the raw data into packets and adding headers, so you would expect it to be less than either 12.5 or 11.9, depending on which "standard" for MB you are using 802.11b is 11Mbps = 11,000,000 bits/sec = 1,375,000 bytes/sec = 1.375 MB/s or 1.311 MiB/s theoretical maximum, but then signal strength, encryption overhead, latency and other traffic will have a significant effect. Be aware that typically, users of GigE switches find ~220Mbps is their actual raw throughput - it's not quite as impressive as the often-expected 1000Mbps.

This sounds like a very complex setup for such a small environment, did you really mean 2-3 domains?I would be very surprised if you needed more than 1 domain and security groups to allocate permissions. Given that W2K8 does everything W2K3 does, only more and better, I'd go with W2K8

Why format the partition beforehand?Just delete it and let the setup do a quick NTFS format, then I doubt you would have the problem. I would guess there were some residual system files when the setup came to run which made it create a windows.old folder. Actually, your properties says Windows Server Enterprise, it is telling you which flavour of Windows Server 2008 you have installed and should have the license for.Hopefully anyone that glanced at the server would recognise it as W2K8 without the properties needing to tell them. Run winver if you are concerned, that is designed to provide more detailed information. Edit: No point arguing semantics, and I like my job too much to discuss details of source trees. Apologies if you were offended at having your questions answered. Your partitions are viewed in the Recycle Bin exactly the same as in Disk Management - the list is being sorted alphabetically by the volume label, it isn't random: Data Srv2008 Storage Vistax64 XP

As you can reproduce the crash easily, use ADPlus to attach to the process in "crash" mode, making sure to select a full dump. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/286350 How to use ADPlus to troubleshoot "hangs" and "crashes" "When should you use ADPlus? ... - Processes that crash or shut down unexpectedly." "Where do you obtain ADPlus? ADPlus is included with the latest Microsoft Debugging Tools for Windows. To obtain the latest Microsoft Debugging Tools for Windows, visit the following Microsoft Web site: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/deb...ault.mspx" Launch an Explorer window, run the following command in command prompt (in the Debugging Tools for Windows folder) and then close the Explorer window to crash it: ADPlus -crash -ctcf -pn explorer.exe -o C:\Dumps That should give you a hefty .DMP file in the C:\Dumps folder in a unique sub-folder, and we can take it from there once you have the dump created. It will most likely be a 3rd party shell extension causing the problem.

"Won't work" - what are the symptoms? An error from the application, or a UAC prompt for admin credentials? You can use Process Monitor from Microsoft to see what registry & file access is going on when a user tries to launch the application, and check the log for access denied (compare with a "good" log from an admin using the application on the same machine).

Either driver or hardware issue - if alternative versions of the nVidia drivers don't help, I would suspect the card might be overheating or faulty. I bought a 6800LE ages ago as an upgrade and the logon screen for WoW looked exactly as you posted, it was a faulty card. (I tried various different drivers and the symptoms changed slightly but the problem did not go away - it affects some games but not others, I guess it depends on what is being requested of the GPU.)

devcon.exe is in the Support Tools on the XP x64 (and 2003 x64) media - I have just installed it on my 2003 x64 Server and verified it is a native 64-bit applicatoin (not tested disabling the NIC, just got a /status * output) What is the reason for wanting to disable the NIC, maybe there is an alternative supported in WMI on the legacy Windows platform? (Such as configuring the IP settings to static values and no DNS or gateway defined)

"Although support for PAE memory is typically associated with support for more than 4 GB of RAM, PAE can be enabled on Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003, and later 32-bit versions of Windows to support hardware-enforced Data Execution Prevention (DEP)."Also, as the BIOS can be moving the addressable memory just above the 32-bit addressable barrier, you need the PAE kernel to be able to address above this address as it's effectively beyond 4GB, even if only 3-4GB is installed.

I wouldn't recommend automating the deletion of files & folders in a temporary folder that is also an environment variable - the main reason being that some processes may put "post-boot" files in there to perform some operations after the OS is restarted (due to file locks or services that cannot be restarted at that time). So if your clever deletion routine kicks in before the process is called, it never finishes its work and you leave the system in an unknown, possibly unstable state. By all means check manually every so often after a clean reboot and check for files that have been clearly left behind after an application crash (or poorly programmed application) - the modified date on the files is the best indicator.

Actually, having to enter the correct password indicates he is logging onto the correct user account, but the fact that the "setting up your desktop" message appears indicates that it has taken the default user template and is creating a new profile for that user. Might be worth a browse in %systemdrive%\Users, and in particular the datestamps on any folders in there too...

Sounds like you have a blank user profile. Check in event logs for anything relevant: - Click Start, right-click Computer, click Manage - Expand Event Viewer / Windows Logs - Highlight System In particular look for any EventLog entries that might indicate the machine shutting down or restarting...

The registry is a collection of memory-mapped files which are loaded at boot-time, so manual edits made to parts of the registry may not take effect until it is "reloaded" - that's why public APIs are available to interface to the OS in this way so that affected processes already running can "see" the changes made immediately. Quite a large amount of the editing of the registry which is done is because there is no UI way to achieve what you want (implementing flags introduced by a hotfix, for example), and the instructions almost always end with "close regedit...restart Windows".

Why did you edit the registry just to create a new file association? All you need to do is: 1. double-click on a file of the type you are interested in 2. select the option "Select a program from a list of installed programs" 3a. if the desired program is in the list, simply double-click it 3b. if it is not in the list, then click Browse and locate your program and click OK So long as you don't clear the box "Always use the selected program to open this kind of file" then your association is remembered, and the icon for that file type should be the default one for that executable.

Wow, this FUD is still doing the rounds... Assuming that the issue is the outbound TCP/IP connection restriction brought in with XP SP2, no it is not "illegal" for Microsoft to implement a design change to their OS which you are running. The article linked which "debunks the value" of the hotfix is erroneous also - it is not capping outbound connections at 10 per second, that would just create a bottleneck for genuine LAN-based activity. The real change was to introduce a limit on the numer of OUTBOUND, HALF OPEN connections over the TCP protocol - at any given time there can be a maximum of 10 connections in the "SYN" (synchronize) state. As soon as the TCP handshake has taken place to establish the session, the connection is no longer HALF open and does not count towards the limit. So how does this help protect against worms? An infected client machine attempts to connect to IP addresses, as it has no idea of where "real" potential victim machines might be - early worms simply worked their way up the subnet increasing the address 1 at a time, and later versions randomized it and had algorithms to favour infecting local machines but also attempt those in other subnets. Pre-SP2, the client could use every single source port available in attempting to locate and infect other machines - around 64,512 - and it could send those requests as fast as the OS could forward them on. Result: very rapidly-spreading worm Now, say the worm still generates a list of addresses it is going to try to infect and runs on a post-SP2 system. First of all the rate at which the connection attempts can be made is unrestricted, until the 10 "half open" limit is hit - in the case of this worm's behaviour it should cause the system to trip the limit almost immediately. Let's say half of the 10 addresses were valid and completed the session setup request, now there are 5 more outbound TCP connetions that can be attempted and the next 5 in the list are tested. Of these 5, only 2 respond, so the next 2 in the list are tested. Let's say for argument's sake that the last 2 do not respond, so now the client has hit the limit of 10 half-open TCP connection attempts and will not make any more until at least 1 has timed out or completed. Result: very slowly-spreading worm (not at a rate of "10 per second") So why does this affect P2P so badly? Very bad design of P2P, basically. Users like to emply firewalls, which is great, only this makes their machines completely unresponsive to connection requests on unadvertised ports. P2P clients obtain a list of peers and seeds for a given file, and then blindly attempt to connect to every single one of them to query them. Result: If the first 10 in the list that the client tries to connect to are all firewalled (so never get the request) then the client is unable to send any more connection requests until at least 1 has timed out The P2P system would benefit from using a "pingback" UDP method to first verify the connectivity and availability between peers, so that those behind NAT routers or using firewalls will not affect performance for everyone else quite so badly. I don't believe Skype is affected by this issue, I have certainly not had any problems with it - probably as it is transmitting realtime data and so it can't waste time on peers that aren't able to assist with routing traffic.