Breaking Windows
Windows rant ahead. Brace yourself.
I have no idea why, but my virtualized Windows XP just started bitching about svchost crashing and started acting all weird on me — and this was on an installation that’s only used (or turned on, even) when I needed to test my code on various versions of IE. At first I thought maybe VMWare got corrupted, so I did a fresh install of VMWare. Then I thought maybe I could revert Windows XP back to its previous known good state. None of these helped, of course. So I did what any sane Windows user would do — complete re-install of Windows XP from scratch! Hah hah! I feel sorry for the poor souls who have to deal with this kind of crap all the time.
Thank god VMWare makes Windows installation easy and fast (at least 1/2 the time it takes for a fresh install on a real PC!). The first thing I do is to get rid of all the fluff out of Windows — games, MSN Explorer, Accessibility programs, Windows tour, Outlook Express (officially dead program by Microsoft’s definition)… etc. Then I started installing various versions of IE (5.01, 5.5, 6.x & 7) and other perceived “goodies” including MSN Live Messenger. Then Windows XP complained again in its own cute little way — it’s looking for msoert2.dll… WTF!?! It’s a fresh install! It couldn’t possibly have something missing that MSN Live Messenger needed!
Then Google said it was a library that was removed when I got rid of Outlook Express. So why is it that MSN Live Messenger 8.5.xxx, the latest and greatest from Redmond, needs to depend on a library from a program that’s supposedly extinct? Locating and putting back the msoert2.dll file back to Windows/system32 directory made it happy again though. And that’s all I cared.
I am guessing it’s a hook for MSN contacts to appear in Outlook Express and Outlook so that people who spend way too much time in those programs can start up chat sessions without having to look for the MSN Live Messenger contact list.
All this crap brought back the good old days of Windows tech support and having to decipher cryptic Windows errors. “Good” times.
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November 12th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
Dude, I have been cursing windows all night and into this morning. I had to use power point to help AJ for a class and that shit crashed my box! Holy EF was I mad. They “try” to make all those windows apps look Mac-like but it’s just a FRONT. LIES LIES LIES!!! Rotton to the core.
November 12th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Aw, man. Sorry to hear that.
Did you try using Apple’s Keynote and then save it as Microsoft PowerPoint file? As long as you don’t use some of the advanced features (like 3D transitions), you should be golden. Just give it a test ride and see what you think. It’s one of those programs that once you’ve tried it, you’d never use another Windows counterpart again. Period.