Kris’s Box

I am a big fan of the XP mode in Windows 7. A.o. it allows me to verify websites that I maintain in IE6, even side-by-side to IE8.

One nice feature is that you can have XP applications appear in the Start Menu of Windows 7, with “Auto Publish“. If Enabled in the XP Mode Settings, any shortcut you add to the All Users Start Menu in XP Mode, will appear in the Windows 7 Start Menu under Windows Virtual PC > Windows XP Mode Applications:

Yesterday however, I noticed that the shortcut for IE6 that I had there, no longer worked. I removed the shortcut in the Start Menu of All Users in XP Mode and added it again, but that did not help. In fact, anything I added to the All Users Start Menu no longer appeared in the Start Menu of Windows 7.
When I checked the Settings of XP Mode, Auto Publish was grayed out, with an obscure error message about not having the latest updates. After a lot of trouble-shooting, without avail, I finally uninstalled XP Mode (via Windows 7′s Control Panel > Programs and features) and reinstalled it. That brought back the Auto Publish feature:

I have no clue about what went wrong, but I have a working IE6 shortcut in my Windows 7 Start Menu again.

I recently encountered a pretty frustrating problem: on a laptop with Windows 7 installed, I could not enable the Wireless Adapter.

It was pretty weird: in Device Manager, everything looked good: the device was “working properly”. Yet I did not see any wireless networks. In Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections, I noticed that the Wireless Adapter was disabled. I could right-click on it and select ‘Enable’, but that did not change the status: the Adapter stayed disabled.

Network Diagnostics reported there was an “unknown” problem with it. Not very helpful. I googled for hours, tried all kinds of things (disable/uninstall-reinstall/tried older versions of the driver/…) until finally I found this post which gave me a hint: apparently, Kaspersky anti-virus was the culprit! The Kaspersky NDIS filter caused the issue.

Process to solve it:

1. Right-click the Wireless Adapter in Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections, select Properties
2. UNcheck Kaspersky Anti-Virus NDIS filter
3. Select the Wireless Adapter, click Diagnose this device – to reset the adapter

Et voila, I (finally) had a working wireless connection again.

I had some video recordings in DVD format (MPEG2, .VOB-files) that I wanted to edit in Adobe Premiere CS3. Unfortunately, Adobe Premiere does not support .VOB files.
After renaming the .VOB files to .MPG, I could import them in Premiere, but the import only contained video, no audio. Some searching on the internet brought relief: apparently it’s as simple as copying a .DLL file from the Adobe Encore CS3 program files folder to the Adobe Premiere CS3 folder. The file you need is ad2ac3dec.dll.
I copied it, restarted Premiere, and indeed, the .MPG file imported nicely with audio.