Category Archives: SysInternals

Case of the Unwanted Chrome Search Modification

Posted on November 26, 2015 by chentiangemalc

A friend’s machine had the Google Chrome home page set to piesearch.com But there is no homepage set in settings. Checking the Chrome Shortcut in Start Menu we can see it’s been modified, so we remove the piesearch parameter. This … Continue reading →

Posted in Group Policy, Internet Explorer, ProcMon, Sys, SysInternals | Leave a comment

App-V Visio and Thick Excel Collide

Posted on June 25, 2014 by chentiangemalc

A 3rd party Excel add-in had stopped working for a group of users, and they all received an error message on launching Excel: Microsoft Visual Basic for ApplicationsSystem Error &H8007007E (-2147024770) Unfortunately the VBA code in question was from the … Continue reading →

Posted in App-V, Office, ProcMon, SysInternals | Leave a comment

Case of the KB2919355 Installation Failure (Windows 8.1 Update)

Posted on April 3, 2014 by chentiangemalc

We had already updated a Windows 8.1 x64 machine with KB2919442 and was starting to install Windows8.1-KB2919355-x64.msu. Firstly it was hanging for ages at the “Installing” phase with no progress… Well that is normal. What is going on here? Using … Continue reading →

Posted in ProcMon, SysInternals, Troubleshooting, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 | 35 Comments

Don’t Use WScript To Launch Batch Files

Posted on May 24, 2012 by chentiangemalc

I had a customer who was rolling out a new Anti-Virus product across tens of thousands of machines via the classic deployment tool ZenWorks 7. However the deployment success was quite low, around 80% success rate. Initial diagnostics by support … Continue reading →

Posted in Batch Files, ProcExp, SysInternals | Tagged | 1 Comment

Case of the Broken UAC Prompt – Extended Attributes are Inconsistent

Posted on January 26, 2012 by chentiangemalc

One day while happily working away on my liquid cooled Windows Developer Preview beast I came across this error when launching regedit: Pretty quickly I found every program that tried to elevate to Administrative privileges had this problem. The UAC … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, ProcMon, SysInternals, Windows 8 | Tagged | 39 Comments

Customizing Default Start Menu in Windows Developer Preview

Posted on November 2, 2011 by chentiangemalc

For those of you trying out deploying Windows Developer Preview via MDT or SCCM (a.k.a. Windows 8) one big annoyance may the Start Menu layout. If you have any applications installed into your image you will find a new user … Continue reading →

Posted in ProcMon, SysInternals, Windows 8 | Tagged | 3 Comments

Case of the Incorrect Side-by-Side Configuration

Posted on August 31, 2011 by chentiangemalc

So I had downloaded the latest version of BIND DNS server for Windows from http://www.isc.org/downloads as I wanted to have an up-to-date version of DNS diagnosis tool dig to be available. However if you just tried running dig.exe by itself  … Continue reading →

Posted in 64-bit, Application Compatibility, ProcMon, SysInternals, Windows 7 | Tagged | 9 Comments

Case of the Group Policy Multiple-Language Overload

Posted on July 27, 2011 by chentiangemalc

I had a colleague ask me “What is with all these languages in Group Policy Results?” Unfortunately this was in Windows XP land and being in Windows 7 so long my memory obviously had a few holes and couldn’t remember … Continue reading →

Posted in Group Policy, PowerShell, ProcMon, SysInternals | Tagged | Leave a comment

Windows SysInternals Administrators Reference Review

Posted on July 13, 2011 by chentiangemalc

So as you probably have guessed I’m a big fan of the Windows Internals Series, with versions 4 & 5 having had serious workouts. So with still no Windows Internals 6 on the horizon had to get this as an … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Review, SysInternals | Tagged | Leave a comment

Process Explorer vs Process Hacker–Part 2 of 2

Posted on July 3, 2011 by chentiangemalc

Continuing from Part 1 here https://chentiangemalc.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/process-explorer-vs-process-hackerpart-1-of-2/ we will now compare more advanced features of Process Explorer & Process Hacker. Run As Options Both Process Explorer and Process Hacker have “Run” options. Process Explorer has “Run” and “Run As Limited User”.While … Continue reading →

Posted in SysInternals, Troubleshooting | Tagged | 4 Comments