stuartandnicola.com

I tried to log on to Vista this evening and got this message for no obvious reason. Nikki's profile was fine, it was just mine that was broken.

I followed the fix suggested in a post at technologyquestions.com that involved a fairly simple registry fix to re-instate my profile that for some reason had been turned in to a back-up.

I installed the new iTunes 9 update tonight, and started getting an error every time iTunes then started. The error was in a window titled QuickTime Handler Window, and the error said that the application could not start because "d3dx9_36.dll was not found".

The error seems to be that a component of DirectX is not present, or up to date, and the fix is to download and reinstall the DirectX components. There's a walkthrough on about.com that explains what to do.

I discovered that the reliability index on our laptop hadn't been updating since July, and I couldn't get the index to start updating again. After some trial and error I discovered that the main system event log had also stopped updating and was telling me that the log was corrupted. When I cleared the main event log the performance index started updating again too. I've described more details about the problem, and the solution, below.

I noticed recently that I was getting lots of errors when I opened Outlook, and it kept reporting that there were errors in my data file and that it had to be checked.

I did some investigation and found that when I closed Outlook the Outlook process in task manager continued to run. If I then shutdown the PC, and rebooted later, Outlook warned me that the data file wasn't closed properly.

I noticed recently that I was getting lots of errors when I opened Outlook, and it kept reporting that there were errors in my data file and that it had to be checked.

I did some investigation and found that when I closed Outlook the Outlook process in task manager continued to run. If I then shutdown the PC, and rebooted later, Outlook warned me that the data file wasn't closed properly.

I did some research and it seemed to suggest that a faulty Outlook add-in might be the issue, so I tried disabling various ones but with no improvement.

Our new PC had (and still has!) Vista on it, and the newest Office with the weird ribbon system. At work we both use Office 2003, so we were keeping our old XP machine just to run the older office. But that machine is really playing up and is incredibly slow, plus it takes up a lot of space.

I don't use the Vista Help and Support tool very often, but when I opened it today there were no graphics or images, only red crosses in the placeholders where they were supposed to be.

It seems some registry settings are corrupted or missing (as described on this page). That page includes a registry file that repairs the settings.

Nikki's mum and dad were clearing out some old stuff and found an old flat panel monitor that I gave them AGES ago. I decided to try plugging it to our "spare" PC as whoever was working on that finds they really miss having a wide screen!

It works great - for me doing my Drupal stuff it's maybe even better than the wide panel as the combined width is even more than the widescreen, so I can have Eclipse open on one screen, and run IE/Firefox/Safari on the other for testing, or for looking up help.

Not sure how I managed to do it, but somehow the Windows Update link on my start menu dropped down and was in with all the other programs, instead of being above the little divider bar. In fact, the divider disappeared completely. It's been bugging me for a while and I finally discovered the trick to restoring it here.

As part of setting up my Vista PC I decided to overhaul my music library. I wanted to sync things in to my iPod, but I had most of my stuff ripped as WMA files. That means iTunes wants to convert everything to its own format, so I get two copies of everything.

iTunes native format is .m4a, which won't play in WMA, so to have the choice of WMP or iTunes means having everything twice (and I quite like the new media player in Vista).