Image by lloydi via Flickr

CA Internet security and I haven’t gotten along very well in the past and my attempts to get rid of it were just a continuation of the same problems. Previously I had had problems getting a Removed by HIPS FW error on webpages and that led to me researching the efw file problem that so many people were having. Well, the next and hopefully final problem I’ve had is when trying to uninstall. I was signed in as the administrator but still got a W9011 error claiming I didn’t have the correct permissions and giving me a registry key.

It’s pretty easy to give yourself the correct permissions, but we do have to dive into the registry so you’ll want to be very careful and change only the items that are listed in the error message (or 10 messages as mine ended up)

Here’s what you need to do to fix the problem

1. Run the uninstall and leave the error message up on the screen
2. Click on the Start Button and the Click ‘Run’ and type ‘regedit’ and press enter
3. You should now see the registry editor
4. Find the correct registry key (this is set up like normal folders so just navigate like you would in the windows file system
5. Right-click and select permissions
6. Click on your user name
7. Check the Full Control box and apply
8. Close the error and rerun the uninstall process
9. Repeat as needed for more error messages

I got a question on my post about how to fix the Removed by HIPS FW bug and I thought it was worth answering in another post. Mark, who has Roadrunner as his ISP, had downloaded their free offer of CA Internet Security suite and had since noticed that many of the files he was trying to download (i think from e-mail) where getting changed to .efw files. This is CA’s way of making sure you don’t accidentally run a file on the off chance that it contains a virus. The real problem here is that it can often prohibit you from running files intentionally! There are two ways to handle this:

1. Rename the file extension - If it’s supposed to be a .zip file just rename it to .zip from .efw and you’re good to go! You will have to know what the file extension was supposed to be in the first place, but that’s all you have to do and it will work just like normal.
2. Disable the quarantine - If you trust yourself more than CA does then you can just disable the feature that renames the files, here’s how:

• Open the CA Security Center
• Click on CA Personal Firewall then Open Advance Settings
• On the Personal Firewall window, click the Email icon on the left
• Select the Email Attachments tab on the top right
• Scroll down and double click the .ZIP entry to pop up a small settings window
• Uncheck the Quarantine all matching files box and click OK
• Do the same for any other file types you regularly recieve

That should do it! Your version of CA could be a little different than the instructions provided above, but hopefully that will be enough information for you to find what you need, Good Luck!

P.S. If you just have CA for antivirus and are sick of it, then consider trying the free version of AVG. I have a link to the download site along with some other useful and free programs on my post about Great Free Software.  If you want a full internet security suite and are willing to pay for it, try one of the best: Kaspersky Internet Security 7.0

I’ve been using Gregarious for the social bookmarking links on the Knetwork and it’s really an amazing plugin. Shortly after this week’s Digg update I noticed that some of my Digg links were going astray, instead of going where they were supposed to, they linked off to seemingly random older stories on Digg. Not good! Check ALL of your Digg links for this past week to make sure the work correctly!

After further investigation I figured out that the diggs were running off to stories that had the same title as the Digg category they were submitted into. Upgrading Gregarious didn’t solve the problem. I did some reading and posted a help post on Gregarious’s author’s website and he’s been kind enough to look into it. He believes that there was a problem with the Digg API and notified them of the issue. The problem seems to have been corrected but I manually fixed my links so I don’t know if the correction fixes previous bad links. If not, here’s what I did in Wordpress as a workaround to get things pointing back where they belong:

1. Wait until the post is Dugg
2. Goto the edit page and expand the Custom Fields section
3. In the href portion of the link code remove the extra / after digg.com so it looks like …digg.com/blahblahblah instead of digg.com//blahblahblah
4. Click the Update button next to the field
5. Confirm that your link works!

This is a picture of a HEAP of Desktops. Recently I found out the hard way that Windows XP also has a Desktop HEAP. I recently was upgraded at work to a Dell Optiplex GX620 with Windows XP Pro. I received the nice new machine with 2 gigs of RAM, a fast large hard drive, and a dual core processor. I thought everything would be great. After about 1 month the flakiness began.

With about 10 or more applications open Windows XP began freaking out. When I right clicked on a desktop icon nothing would happen. I would click on the My Computer icon and get nothing. I would click anything that should open another Window and get nothing. It was if I had reached the maximum total number of Windows.

I tried restarting EXPLORER.EXE. Basically EXPLORER.EXE controls your start bar and coordinates many windows functions. This did not seem to help. If I closed out of 1 application it seemed to temporarily fix it. After a Windows reboot it would seem to be better for a short period of time.

After enduring this problem for far too long a session Googling produced THE answer…. The Desktop HEAP. The answer is a quick registry change. For technical details about the Desktop HEAP see this link. The registry string in question is:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\SubSystems]
Windows=”%SystemRoot%\system32\csrss.exe ObjectDirectory=\Windows SharedSection=1024,3072,512 Windows=On SubSystemType=Windows ServerDll=basesrv,1 ServerDll=winsrv:UserServerDllInitialization,3 ServerDll=winsrv:ConServerDllInitialization,2 ProfileControl=Off MaxRequestThreads=16″

I simply edited the 3072 and upped it to 8192. The 3072 is 1024 KB x 3 or 3 MB. I simply increased it to 8 MB. Always be sure to back up your registry before making any changes. The problem instantly went away. I found later that Microsoft does provide a tool for determining if this is your problem. Link. In a nutshell Microsoft describes desktop heap problems as:

“When you run a large number of Windows-based programs, “Out Of Memory” error messages appear when you attempt to start new programs or try to use programs that are already running, even though you still have plenty of physical and pagefile memory available.”

This was a Windows quirk that appears to be more of a problem with Windows XP than any previous version of Windows. The diagnosis was the hardest part. If you think you might have the same problem I would suggest downloading the “Desktop Heap Monitor Version 8.1″ tool from the above link.

My wife’s copy of Photoshop was doing some pretty weird things.  It would go through all the motions of starting up and then just disappear, crashing with no warning or error code.  I tried several different things including disabling the spyware detector and anti-virus to no avail.  Then I did what I should have done in the first place, I Googled it.  I had it fixed in about a minute after reading this post.  It tuns out that the settings file had somehow gotten corrupted and just needed to be deleted.  Holding down Ctrl, Alt, and Shift will allow you to do this.  When prompted, just delete the file and Photoshop works again!  You’ll have to customize a few things over again but that not a big deal compared to it never working again.

   My 5 1/2 month old son had just started an afternoon nap and my wife took the opportunity to get in the shower (which is why you can’t believe her if she says I screamed like a little girl and jumped on a chair).  I heard my son stirring and walked into his nursery to help him get back to sleep, I sat down next to his crib and was patting him back to sleep when I felt something tickle my foot.  At first I just guessed it was the cat, but a moment later it occurred to me that CATS ARE SOFT!  I immediately picked my foot up and looked down to see….

This monster staring right back at me

It was dark and he was not the least bit scared of me.  I jumped out of the chair and turned on the light (in very manly way)  and came back to take a closer look.  I found a jar to put him in and nudged him into it and then searched the crib and the rest of the room to see if he had any friends around.  I have no idea how this guy got into the house, up a flight of stairs, and made a left into the babies room.  I kept him on my desk for a little while for ID,  where I grew pretty fond of the fellow, and now he’s been released into the front yard on parole for good behavior.

He was a male Stag Beetle (Lucanus capreolus)!  If you ever need to ID a bug I found these two sites to be very helpful:  Bug Guide and What’s that bug?