More Issues with Google Toolbar on Firefox 24.0

Those of you that follow my blog know that I am addicted to the Google Toolbar and have struggled to keep it going in Firefox despite the fact that Google no longer supports it in Firefox.

See my previous posts on this topic:

• Google Toolbar on Firefox 11
• Google Toolbar on Firefox 13

Now, with Firefox version 24.0 we have yet another issue.  With the Google Toolbar Add-On extension installed and enabled, you can no longer open a new tab in Firefox.  You can open a second instance of Firefox, but when you click on the New Tab button (the + sign) or press Ctl-T nothing happens.  Oddly, if you disable the Google Toolbar for Firefox extension, then suddenly all of your new tabs you previously requested suddenly appear.

The only work-around found so far is to press the CTRL key as you click a link or right-click a link and choose, "Open Link in New Tab".  Once the new Tab is open, then use that tab for what you need.  Another possibility is to downgrade to Firefox version 23.

Another tip.  Type about:blank in the address bar, hit enter, which gives you a blank page, and then save that in the Bookmarks Toolbar, now you have a quicker way to right-click on a link to give you a new Tab to work with.

Update (10/2/2013)
Many thanks to John Tombs who alerted me to a fix (workaround) to this issue.

In a post on this forum: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/967747#answer-485381 a user called WhopperCock said:

"Type about:config into your browser, then type browser.newtab.preload into the long search bar that appears, then set the Value to False, restart browser and it should be working fine just like it did for me."

This worked perfectly for me.  Hope it will help others as well.  And thank you WhopperCock, whomever you are, for posting the fix.

Desktop Icons Missing

A user reported that all of their Windows Desktop icons and shortcuts were missing on their Windows XP Service Pack 3 computer.  It was immediately assumed they had been bit with Malware, and they had.  Ran several scans with various packages to clean up this PC, but still the Desktop Icons were missing.

Then discovered that restoring these Desktop Icons and Desktop Shortcuts was super easy because hiding them, as it turns out, is an "option" in Windows.

So it was simply a matter of right-clicking on the Desktop, choosing Arrange Icons By, and clicking Show Desktop Icons.

It's unclear if the malware turned off the icons or if the user did it by accident.

Thanks to this MS article for helping solve this:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330170

Unable to re-join a computer to a Windows Domain

Last week a co-worker had an interesting (this means frustrating) problem.  The hard drive in a Windows XP SP3 desktop computer was bad.  He replaced it and then restored the backup image using Symantec System Recovery.

Unfortunately it wouldn't let him login to the Active Directory domain after the restore.  We have run into this before and in the past we simply login to the PC as a local administrator, un-join the computer from the domain and then re-join it to the domain.

This time, however, when he un-joined from the domain, it didn't really do it.  The computer was still listed in Active Directory.  So he manually deleted it from Active Directory.

When he went to re-join the computer to the domain, he kept getting this message:

"Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user, using more than one user name, are not allowed. Disconnect all previous connections to the server or shared resource and try again."

We repeatedly used this command to see if there were any active connections:

net use

And then this command to delete all connections (even though there were none listed):

net use * /delete

We ultimately figured out the issue was previously mapped network printers were in the list and this was preventing us from re-joining the domain.  We not only had to delete these network printers from the Printers list, but also had to walk the Windows Registry and delete all references to these printers.  Once done, we rebooted the PC and then successfully re-joined the Windows Active Directory Domain.