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How do I prevent users from opening TIF files?
A customer had a question about their Windows XP installations. (This question was from several years ago, so the fine details aren't really relevant any more, but I'm actually telling this story for...
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Shortcut properties are in the shortcut, so if they can read the shortcut,...
A customer wanted to know if "there was a way to hide the properties of a shortcut." We asked for an explanation of the problem they were trying to solve, so we could understand what their question...
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A process shutdown puzzle, Episode 2
A customer reported that their program would very sporadically crash in the function CloseÂThreadÂpoolÂCleanupÂGroupÂMembers. The customer was kind enough to provide a stack trace at the point of the...
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What were the tests that WinG did to evaluate video cards?
Georg Rottensteiner was curious about the weird things that WinG performed on installation to evaluate video cards. "What did it do actually and what for?" I don't actually know, since I was not...
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When you don't speak a language, don't sound like you speak the language
I appreciate the help from Christoph and Voo in refining my German. But that reminds me of a story about a friend of a friend. She was in Japan to visit some friends. Although she speaks English and...
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What happened to the Summary information created on Windows 2000 and Windows XP?
In Windows 2000 and Windows XP, you could add Summary information on the Details property page to files of all types. Text files, image files, some crazy file your grandmother sent you in a file...
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Why is there sometimes a long delay between pressing a hotkey for a shortcut...
Via a customer liaison, we received a problem report from a customer. The customer is facing issues with delayed desponses to opening a .lnk file by pressing its keyboard shortcut hotkey. This delay...
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How does Explorer calculate the folder size information in the folder tooltip?
This information is accurate as of Windows 7; the algorithm may change for future versions of Windows. The information is being provided for the edification of computer network administrators, who are...
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How does the MultiByteToWideChar function treat invalid characters?
The MB_ERR_INVALID_CHARS flag controls how the MultiÂByteÂToÂWideÂChar function treats invalid characters. Some people claim that the following sentences in the documentation are contradictory:...
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Why are the Windows 7 system notification icons colorless?
Mike wondered why the system notification icons went colorless in Windows 7 and why they went back to regular tooltips instead of the custom tooltips. I don't know either, so I asked Larry Osterman,...
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Why can't I use the file sharing wizard if I exclude inheritable permissions...
In Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, if you go to a the advanced security settings for a directory and uncheck "include inheritable permissions from this object's parent", then go back to the...
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How do I hide a window without blocking on it?
A customer was working on improving their application startup performance. They found that if their application was launched immediately after a fresh boot, the act of dismissing their splash screen...
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Cheap amusement: Searching for spelling errors in the registry
One source of cheap amusement is searching for spelling errors in the registry. For example, one program tried to register a new file extension, or at least they tried, except that they spelled...
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When you crash on a mov ebx, eax instruction, there aren't too many obvious...
A computer running some tests encountered a mysterious crash: eax=ffffffff ebx=00000000 ecx=038ef548 edx=17b060b4 esi=00000000 edi=038ef6f0 eip=14ae1b77 esp=038ef56c ebp=038ef574 iopl=0 nv up ei pl nz...
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Warum deine Mutter Deutsch spricht
This upcoming Sunday is Mother's Day in the United States. In recognition of the holiday last year, a local church displayed the following message on its message board: "God couldn't be / everywhere /...
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What is the historical reason for MulDiv(1, -0x80000000, -0x80000000)...
Commenter rs asks, "Why does Windows (historically) return 2 for MulDiv(1, -0x80000000, -0x80000000) while Wine returns zero?" The MulDiv function multiplies the first two parameters and divides by...
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Microspeak: The parking lot
Mike Dunn wonders what the Microspeak term parking lot means. I'm not familiar with this term either, and the first document I turned up during my search was a PowerPoint presentation that said "Avoid...
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Sure, we do that: Context menu edition
A customer reported a problem that occurred only when they installed a particular application. If they uninstalled it, then the problem went away. After installing the application, the "Run As"...
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How to view the stack of threads that were terminated as part of process...
As we saw some time ago, process shutdown is a multi-phase affair. After you call ExitProcess, all the threads are forcibly terminated. After that's done, each DLL is sent a DLL_PROCESS_DETACH...
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Charles Petzold is back with another edition of Programming Windows
Back in the day (and perhaps still true today), Charles Petzold's Programming Windows was the definitive source for learning to program Windows. The book is so old that even I used it to learn Windows...
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