cluberti

So, do other brosers work, or do they not? It's not clear from your post.

upgrading a video card, or adding more RAM, those are minor. Replacing a system's guts (the motherboard) would be considered major, and would likely trigger reactivation (unless the motherboards were identical, of course - that might not trigger it).

Try Process Monitor, to see if it's a particular file that it's trying to access. How much physical RAM do you have, and what version of Vista are you running? BTW, I've had this problem before on some of my machines as well, and it was being caused by (of all things) the Realtek HD audio driver. Just a thought.

Usually this happens when you log on as a domain account with the same name as the local account (in this case, Administrator) - you'll get a profile folder "Administrator" for the local user, and "Administrator.DOMAIN" for the domain user. Usually, though, autologon logs in with the local administrator account, and not the domain admin account. However, if you reg edit or script your CD to log on as a domain admin, you're going to get .DOMAIN folders, and there's really no way around that happening. You can keep from getting an "Administrator.DOMAIN" folder, and the ways to keep this from happening would be to: A. Not join the machine to the domain B. Rename the Administrator account, either on the domain, or on the local PC Changing the administrator account name on the domain is actually a GOOD idea, and creating a limited, disabled, locked out account called "administrator" on the domain is also something to consider. I'd say B. is your best bet, honestly, if the machine needs to join the domain during build.

Exactly .

From technet:

Is this a domain machine - i.e., are you logging on with a domain administrator account?

Well, it is possible (seems odd that it powers down though) - does your BIOS have an Automated System Restart (ASR) feature?

Technically, it is - every user other than the built-in Administrator account gets a split token when UAC is enabled. The only account with complete control is the built-in Administrator user, but as you've already noted, things in Home Basic (and Starter) are different. Note that you may be able to disable UAC via the registry: Key: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System Value: EnableLUA Type: REG_DWORD Data: 0 Reboot and UAC should be completely off.

If trusted sites doesn't work, you can always do this - just make sure you REALLY trust the site the applet came from before adding it to the local intranet zone. Sites in this zone have considerable power on your machine to run code.

I usuallly leave the built-in accounts alone, and only assign profile paths to regular users. Roaming admin accounts just doesn't make much sense in most environments, as you really should never use that account to do anything more than major upgrades and patching.

You'd have to make the profile path read-only, but yes, it'll work if it's a .man profile.

Well, it is funny. That happened _far_ too often in Win9x, and it's funny to see the bit. Don't take it too seriously, heck, it came from Letterman's show

To get XP's Netmeeting to work on Vista x86: - Copy the Netmeeting folder from the XP machine to C:\Program Files\NetMeeting - Copy msconf.dll to %windir%\system32 - Run "regsvr32 %windir%\system32\msconf.dll" - Import netmeeting.reg Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\\CLSID\{068B0800-718C-11d0-8B1A-00A0C91BC90E}] @="Microsoft NetMeeting Manager Object 3" [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\CLSID\{068B0800-718C-11d0-8B1A-00A0C91BC90E}\InProcServer32] @="\"C:\\Program Files\\NetMeeting\\nmcom.dll\"" "ThreadingModel"="Apartment" - Run C:\Program Files\NetMeeting\conf.exe To get XP's NetMeeting to work on Vista x64: - Copy the Netmeeting folder from the XP machine to C:\Program Files (x86)\NetMeeting - Copy msconf.dll to %windir%\syswow64 - Run "regsvr32 %windir%\syswow64\msconf.dll" - Import netmeeting.reg Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Wow6432Node\CLSID\{068B0800-718C-11d0-8B1A-00A0C91BC90E}] @="Microsoft NetMeeting Manager Object 3" [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Wow6432Node\CLSID\{068B0800-718C-11d0-8B1A-00A0C91BC90E}\InProcServer32] @="\"C:\\Program Files (x86)\\NetMeeting\\nmcom.dll\"" "ThreadingModel"="Apartment" - Run C:\Program Files (x86)\NetMeeting\conf.exe

You need to add the site to your trusted sites list.

Only desktop extension will work (without driver hacks) in Vista. If it detects two monitors, you can only extend. A driver would have to fool windows into sending the same signal to both monitors.

Well, not exactly true - Windows 2003 x64 and Windows XP x64 are both running the exact same 5.2.3790 kernel.

Force everyone to the same profile path, and rename ntuser.dat to ntuser.man in that profile. It'll make it mandatory.

Old fashioned.

Well, consider this your first then . It does quite well against most viruses, and Symantec is pretty quick about getting def updates out to corp customers. I've not had it crash or otherwise mangle a machine in over 4 years and 3 versions, so I'm pretty pleased with it. I'd still prefer eTrust, but some people have had bad luck with CA in the past and get gunshy (basically anyone who's ever tried Unicenter/Unipig).

Is there any reason you're unable to push down the .exe package? It's basically just a bunch of registry entries, btw.

If the AD domain name is rami.au, and the machines were joined to the rami.au zone, then I would expect DNS forward entries for those machines. If they belong to rami.global, then that does not make sense .

Actually, eTrust is used on campus. As to antivirus packages, I have to give a disclaimer here in that I spend all day troubleshooting, fixing, and working around the performance problems almost all antivirus packages cause (and I've seen problems with all of the above listed in the poll over the years, none is sacred), so I'm a bit jaded. However, for home use, I find eTrust to be good enough and resource-friendly enough, but I've also got beefy machines with resources to spare so it isn't that important to me that a program be small or fast - but be reliable and good at detection. For corporate environments, I also recommend eTrust, but Symantec corporate versions of their antivirus product (not the Norton crapware they dupe home users into using) are quite stable and good at virus detection, and in a corporate environment that is usually tantamount to anything else, speed or resource utilization included. Just my .02¢.

Yes - that means you're sharing the wireless connection's internet connection, which it doesn't have. You need to share the network connection connected to the broadband router, otherwise all inbound traffic for the internet will attempt to reach it via the wireless card.

Right, but where did the files come from before they were on this machine? They're getting tagged because they don't have the "My Computer" zone tagged in their metadata, which means they didn't come from a CD nor were created on that machine (according to Vista), so they had to have come from another machine. Where did they come from?