Mouse not working in MS Word 2002 SP3 Office XP

Worked on a Windows XP computer today that has Microsoft Word 2002 SP3 (This is part of MS Office XP). When you open Word and type some text, you cannot highlight that text or click on it in any way with your mouse.

Using your mouse to click the menus works OK, and you can highlight the text using the keyboard.

This symptom was unique to certain people's profiles on this machine. Others logged into this machine did not have the problem.

I'm not totally sure what fixed it. I was trying the options listed in this Microsoft Support article (link below) including the Fix-It button and after a couple of steps would try it again.

How to reset user options and registry settings in Word

I think the cure was deleting all template files (*.dot) from this directory:

C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates\

I was about to do the step regarding COM Add-Ins (have to open Word for that) and viola it was working.

I had already tried deleting the normal.dot file from this and other folders, but that didn't help.

Errors installing Microsoft Security Essentials

During the install of Microsoft Security Essentials I was receiving the following errors:

• 0x80070643
• 0x8004FF37

In the end I found a Windows OneCare Cleanup Tool here:

http://social.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/onecareinstallandactivate/thread/399071e2-49dc-4767-932d-d261e3965943/

This machine never had OneCare installed, but as I watched the cleanup tool do its work I noticed it was cleaning up older versions of Windows Antimalware and Windows Defender. This machine did have Windows Defender once upon a time.

For what its worth the Cleanup Tool wanted a reboot, but I declined, and MSE installed successfully.

Rogue antivirus still showing after removal

While in Spiceworks I noticed a computer that said it had two antivirus packages installed. One was legitimate (Symantec Endpoint) and the other was called "Personal Internet Security". After Googling I find this is malware; a fake antivirus package.

I found that once upon a time this machine had been infected with this. Somehow it had registered itself with Windows Security Center thus was still showing as an installed antivirus package. Funny thing too, it said it was current on its virus definitions.

To correct this I issued the following commands from a CMD prompt on that PC:

net stop winmgmt
cd /d %windir%\system32\wbem
ren repository repository.old
net start winmgmt

As I understand it, if you had an issue where no antivirus package was being found by Windows Security Center, the above commands might work for that too.

After issuing the above commands, I forced Spiceworks to rescan and it correctly identified that just Symantec Endpoint was installed.

System Restore eating up disk space

Today I was working on a PC that kept failing backups. Once I started the backup I was intrigued at how long it estimated to complete. Upon further investigation I could see that the disk space used was over 45 Gigabytes. This is extremely high for this PC.

Using TreeSize Free it reported only 13 Gigabytes being used. TreeSize Free cannot access the hidden System Volume Information folder. It then occurred to me that the System Restore might be the culprit.

As it turns out on Windows XP, the default for System Restore is to use up to 12% of the total disk space. This is huge when you consider the size of hard drives today. Obviously I wanted to reduce this size not only on this machine but for many others that we are responsible for.

Many thanks to Steen Kirkby's Blog for leading me in the right direction.

Using one of our favorite tools called VNCscan we were able to create some scripts to help roll-out the changes to several computers at once.

By reducing all of the computers to use just 1% of their total hard drive space will save us a ton of space on our backup volumes. On the troubled PC that started all of this, we went from using over 45 Gigabytes of space to just 13 Gigabytes.

In VNC Scan we broke this up into three scripts.

Script 1 - System Restore Cap to 1 percent (a CMD script)

%SYSTEMDRIVE%

cd \temp\vncscan

:: The following sets the maximum percentage of disk space used by System Restore

REG ADD "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Currentversion\SystemRestore" /v DiskPercent /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

REG ADD "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Currentversion\SystemRestore\Cfg" /v DiskPercent /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

ECHO Now you must stop and restart System Restore

PAUSE

Script 2 - System Restore OFF (a VBS script)

strComputer = "."

set objWmi = GetObject("winmgmts://" & strComputer & _

"/root/default:SystemRestore")

objWmi.Disable("")

WScript.Echo "System Restore disabled"

Script 3 - System Restore ON (a VBS script)

strComputer = "."

set objWmi = GetObject("winmgmts://" & strComputer & _

"/root/default:SystemRestore")

objWmi.Enable("")

WScript.Echo "System Restore enabled"

Hoping this will help someone else in the future.

Manually Updating GoToMyPC

Since GoToMyPC released their IPad client I have been wanting to try it out. I finally learned that in order for it to work your PC must be running at least version 7.x of their software.

If I went to a PC that had version 6.x you're supposed to be able to right-click the tray icon and "Check for Updates" but it always said I had the latest version.

Finally found this web page:

http://support.gotomypc.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=5647

At the very bottom in fine print they tell you to manually upgrade click this link:

http://www.gotomypc.com/setupSoftware.tmpl

I went there, had to login first, but was then offered the download. Had to install it twice to get it to take, and even after it took, it then told me I had an update to apply. By the way, this is on a Windows XP SP3 machine.

This update process is obviously very buggy.

Geocode Searching in TweetDeck

I've been playing around with doing localized searches of Twitter messages using TweetDeck for Windows. I haven't tried other flavors of TweetDeck, but would expect them to work too.

In this example we'll use the main Knoxville, TN Post Office as our center point. Our post office is located at:

1237 E Weisgarber Rd, Knoxville TN

So, go to http://geocoder.us and type in the address you want to be the center point (typically your home address).

The format you will use in TweetDeck is

geocode:Latitude,Longitude,distance

Distance can be expressed in Miles (mi) or Kilometers (km)

Now in TweetDeck, add a new search column and use the examples below:

To find all Tweets with a 5 Mile Radius:

geocode:35.943316,-84.011165,5mi

To find all Tweets in a 10 Mile radius that contain the word "fun":

fun geocode:35.943316,-84.011165,5mi

You could also do similar searches from the Twitter.com search website http://search.twitter.com.

There you can define searches that contains a "Place" such as Knoxville, Atlanta, Boston, etc. You can also use a Zip Code.

Find all Tweets within 5 Miles of the 37909 zip code:

In Twitter's search box you enter: near:37909 within:5mi

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=+near%3A37909+within%3A5mi

Find all tweets within 15 Miles of Knoxville that contain the words "Krispy Kreme":

In Twitter's general search you enter: "Krispy Kreme" near:Knoxville within:15mi

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=+%22Krispy+Kreme%22+near%3AKnoxville+within%3A15mi