Matt Broadstock

I love scripting

Matt Broadstock — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 21:27:00 GMT

I absolutely love being able to automate processes.

I just saved one of our teams around 300 man hours by writing a script to pull information from some very poorly formatted Excel documents into MS Access. It took all of 20 minutes to write and saved them from having to manually enter all of the data. Not only was it going to take a loooong time to manually enter it but you just know there would have been all sorts of errors since they were doing it by hand.

Scripting is your friend! :)

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MOM Management Pack to find updated MOM Management Pack

Matt Broadstock — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 01:52:00 GMT

Not sure if anyone already posted on this but every MOM install should have this MP loaded. Cool stuff. Found 8 of them that were out of date at my current client.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a24cea3a-1920-4b18-8cf2-8bf78c94c917&DisplayLang=en

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MOM - GUI for putting computers and/or Computer Groups into Maintenance Mode

Matt Broadstock — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 01:35:00 GMT

I'll blog on it in more detail in a bit but I figured I would share what I have so far and get feedback on it.

I wrote a little app over the past couple of days that I figured others might want to use...

It is an HTA that will allow you to put either Computers or Computer Groups into Maintenance Mode easily (from any system).

Just go to www.smsutils.com and go to the Community Downloads area.

Here is a link to a screenshot (http://www.smsutils.com/portals/0/images/MomMaintUtilGUI-ScreenShot.JPG)

It utilizes the following utility: http://www.momsolutions.org/Tools/MaintenanceModeUtility/Maintenance.htm (v1.01).

I think this util could probably use a few tweaks but it certainly does the job (kudos to whoever did the work on it!). I am pretty they just took the SDK example and made some improvements to it. I'm guessing the SDK example wasn't exactly stellar (they never are)..

So, check it out and let me know what ya think..

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VBS - Sorting a dictionary object

Matt Broadstock — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 18:15:00 GMT

All of the examples that I found on the internet were WAY too complicated and hard to follow. Here is a very simple dictionary sort function that I figured I would share.

Function SortDict(ByVal objDict)
'Call using "Set objDictSorted = SortDict(objDict)"

Dim i, j, temp

For Each i In objDict
  For Each j In objDict
   If(objDict.Item(i) <= objDict.Item(j)) Then
    temp = objDict.Item(i)
    objDict.Item(i) = objDict.Item(j)
    objDict.Item(j) = temp
   End If
  Next
Next

'For Each i In objDict
' WScript.Echo objDict.Item(i)
'Next

Set SortDict = objDict

End Function

keyword: sortdictionary

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Just experienced the worst implementation of a project I have ever been involved in

Matt Broadstock — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 16:45:00 GMT

28 hours without any sleep and still counting.... Thousands of pissed off users. Not a great day in my world. I suppose I should be content that everything that I was responsible for worked fine but I hate being associated with a project that fails so miserably...especially when it would have been very simple for things to go smoothly.

Backing up a bit, we went live with a metadirectory project at midnight last night. Unfortunately, 4000+ AD accounts ended up having their password set to the password from one of the other connected systems. This might have been ok had it been planned to work that way. Alas, a ton of users came in the morning and couldn't logon to their desktops. On top of that, the communication plan didn't get sent out to the IT staff until late last week and some of them never forwarded it on to the users that they are responsible for.

Needless to say, I am quite pissed off right now. I like to fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants as much as anyone but there are some projects that have to be carefully coordinated and tested before you implement them. Anything that has the potential to delete/create/disable accounts and sync passwords would seem to fit that criteria. It is especially annoying because I kept pushing for the project to get pushed back 2 weeks because a ton of last minute changes were being made. Never a good thing. And 2 weeks would have been plenty of time to do everything properly. This project was on hold for almost 2 years...is 2 more weeks going to kill you? Plus, a couple of us kept saying that we needed to get our communication out to everyone much sooner so it could be reviewed and disseminated as needed. End result, tons of users that called in hadn't even heard that a major change was coming.

Anyway, I'm tired and pissed off and I think I'll take a day off. The scary thing, this is only phase 1...the next phase will have a lot more impact. I hope they have learned their lessons on this one. I've been doing this IT crap for 12 years or so now and I'm sad to say that this is the most disappointed I have ever been in a large-scale project that I was a key member on. I'm a bit frustrated with myself because I *knew* it was going to go badly. I should've raised a bigger stink about the concerns that I had.

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Wallace/Clinton Political rant - stay away if you only want tech stuff

Matt Broadstock — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 07:03:00 GMT

I must admit that I listen to Fox News on the radio a fair bit if only to get a good laugh. I'm always left wondering if people like O'Reilly and (insa-)Hannity actually believe what they are saying or just know that Rush Limbaugh got rich being an inflammatory moron and decided to take things to the next level.

But...the interview that Chris Wallace recently had with Bill Clinton (transcript) is ridiculous. I was so happy to see Clinton's response to the crap that Wallace was feeding him. And, even though I don't particularly like our current president, shouldn't you show a lot more respect for any current or ex-president? Between that interview and the horribly factually-incorrect "Path to 9/11" that aired on ABC lately, it seems like history is (attempting to be) re-written right before our very eyes. I mean, sheesh! The 9/11 documents are public. Don't you have some responsibility to be factually accurate on something like this?

As a comparison, something like "The DiVinci Code" is set in the context of our history and does a great job of mixing up true facts with not-so-true "facts" to create a believable back-story. I personally know people who believed a bunch of the false stuff in the book. But--big difference here--the book is portrayed as a work of fiction! Not so for ABC's little "documentary".

We've always known that the winners re-write history. I guess I just like to think that technology would make that impossible in today's world. But, I suppose the almighty dollar is how you manipulate opinion and history in today's information-driven world. In today's world, we don't lose information. We are just force-fed misinformation on a daily basis. It seems that we listened to Orwell just fine. We just got a little confused and took what he said as advice instead of a warning. Come on...we shouldn't be trying to create the "Thought Police" of 1984 fame...

Olbermann has some good commentary although I think he probably goes a bit far. Probably justified considering Fox News-lackey Wallace's behavior though...

I suppose all of this is happening now because of the upcoming elections. Might as well get used to (more than usual) blatant lying from both sides...

I'll close out with a couple of quotes from Orwell:

"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." (from "Politics and the English Language")

"He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future." ("1984")

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Remote Assistance if you have IE7 installed

Matt Broadstock — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 06:37:00 GMT

I don't remember what site I found this one but you can create a shortcut with the following command so that Remote Assistance will work under IE7. I think I'm one version behind on IE7 so they may have fixed it but it has been an issue on all 3 versions I have installed.

hcp://CN=Microsoft%20Corporation,L=Redmond,S=Washington,C=US/Remote%20Assistance/Escalation/Unsolicited/Unsolicitedrcui.htm

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Me and my dad's virus-laden computer

Matt Broadstock — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 02:17:00 GMT

Warning, rant time!

I went back to Kansas over the weekend to see my family (hadn't been back in 5-6 months) and one of the things I needed to squeeze in was fixing my dad's computer that I built for him a while back. He thought the new hard drive was having problems (the system wouldn't boot). I'm not sure what the hardware problem was..I just unplugged everything and plugged them back in and everything worked. I thought the power supply was fried because the fans were'nt even spinning up but everything turned out ok....until....

I actually got into XP and about 9 gazillion weird applications launched. Popups, strange VB6 apps, apps that didn't launch properly and generated errors, etc. I wasn't aware that you could get 15 IE popups when you didn't even have an active internet connection until I dealt with this mess. Turns out he hadn't gotten around to installing the antivirus that he had actually purchased before I built his system. The fact that he already had AV was the reason I didn't load something on it when I built it. Plus, I ran out of time so I didn't get SP2 on it when I built it so it wasn't as patched as it should've been (he was supposed to do that as soon as he got home too! Bad Dad!). So, bring on Task Manager and let's start killing as many of the 80-some active processes as I can. The system was dog-slow because 99% of the CPU was being used by all of that crap. After that, on to the common places. First, the Run registry keys in HKCU and HKLM. Over 45 entries in the HKLM one. I just renamed those keys instead of bothering with clearing out all of the "bad" entries. Time to reboot and see what is left. Turns out quite a bit.

Well, I managed to get Norton/Symantec installed and it found over 400 instances of spyware/viruses (not just cookies, actual viruses and spyware). Unfortunately, it only cleaned about 80 of them. Next stop, SpyBot. It did better. It got rid of around 300 of them. Reboot, still 50 left--the fun ones. Time to break out the good stuff. AutoRuns from SysInternals. Long-story short...after 9-10 reboots and a bunch of full scans in Norton and SpyBot and manual cleanups using AutoRuns, I managed to get rid of everything....6 hours later. But, without AutoRuns, I never would have gotten rid of the meanest ones. There were a number of them that installed themselves as system-level services that neither SpyBot nor Norton were able to clean. You couldn't kill the processes or even stop the services because they are so ingrained into the system. And they are smart. Those still-running processes re-inject themselves as soon as you delete files and remove registry entries. I was a bit disappointed that SpyBot wasn't even able to clean them out when you set it up to run during bootup because it usually does a great job. Even more disappointing, full system scans with both products didn't find a number of EXEs that are obviously spyware/viruses. I had to manually get rid of a bunch of them. Sometimes Norton would pop up that it "found" it when I started working with it manually but it would fail to clean it or even delete it.

Probably the most annoying one was SurfSideKick 3.0. It seems to be comprised of 3 different system-level services that work together to re-install everything if you don't manage to get rid of everything completely. I tried running a program called "COMBOFIX.EXE" that was supposedly written spefically to take care of this little beast but it failed quite miserably. It certainly *looked* like it was doing all of the things that needed to be done to eradicate it, but, alas, no dice (and it even had a nice little log showing me everything that it did...you'd think it would work, right? ). As I said, w/o AutoRuns or hacking through the Services entries in the registry, I never would've gotten rid of it.

After my frustrations, I have two annoyances: (1) Shouldn't your antivirus be able to do anything that you can do manually? Why did they fail over and over again when there did end up being a specific process that would get rid of everything? I run Symantec at home and it seems to work pretty well on a clean system....obviously it just doesn't work very well on a system that is already heavily infected. (2) When is the government going to start putting these bastards in jail? I saw that the Zotob authors are going to jail now. What is the magical breakdown that makes spyware legal but not a "virus"? What's the difference? How much publicity something gets on CNN? The stupid things change your security settings so you don't get security updates anymore, disable your firewall, disable your antivirus, etc. It is all property damage. And since most of the crap redirects you to web pages so they get advertising $$$ or send your private information to specific sites, why can't we track it down? If the people paying them for sending people to their site won't divulge who they are, put those bastards in jail. Seriously, we wouldn't have to dedicate that many people to this to make it happen. Maybe there is enough money being earned by the big anti-virus companies that we don't want to eradicate them totally and provide a real disincentive to putting this malware out there??

On a happier note, I got two rounds of golf in and shot 82 both rounds (41-41 and 45-37). The first day my driving and ironplay was incredible but I couldn't pitch, chip, or putt. The second day I was driving like crap but my pitching and chipping were awesome and my ironplay was pretty decent (it had to be do get over and around all of the trees I was behind). Lot's of one-putts. Plus, I got to spend some quality time with my parents, sister, grandparents, and my new nephew. Makes the 12 hours of driving all worth it...even with the annoying computer problem that I will promptly erase from my memory as soon as I hit the post button right down there....

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MOF re-compiling time

Matt Broadstock — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 22:21:00 GMT

I got a question from our SMS admin today on why some reports were not working properly. They were only returning a very small number of records when there should have been a LOT more. After some digging, I was able to determine that some custom MOF changes that had been made by the previous SMS admins (those punks!) had been overwritten when SMS 2003 SP2 was installed. So, we haven't been capturing any of this data for the last 7 months or so. Thankfully, Mr. Tucker is a sharp guy and has a backup of the custom MOF that was in use before (I think he got bit once when an upgrade and/or site reset overwrote the custom MOF and learned his lesson). So, we'll just have to identify the differences and create a new customized MOF. Then, I guess you have to push out MOFCOMP to all of your existing Advanced clients so they load the custom class into the WMI namespace. I don't think it will end up being that big of a deal but no one here (including me) has been through the process before. I asked the SMS admin to do some research to make sure we don't miss anything obvious. Should be fun!

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Behavior of Site to Zone Assignment List

Matt Broadstock — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 03:40:00 GMT

We managed to figure out a couple of things concerning this policy setting that is available in IE6/7 under XP SP2 that I couldn't find documented anywhere. This is *THE* setting that I was happiest that they finally included in Group Policy because using proxy exceptions has been about the only decent way to manage them so you could have different security settings for specific sites. Either that or modify a custom ADM every time you wanted to add another site. (Now, if they would just finish the job and get rid of all of the other IE policies that still use that buggy CSE).

First off, a really nice thing. This setting works in conjunction with other policy settings that I was afraid it might conflict with. For instance, if you have your policies setup to add any sites that are in the Proxy Exceptions list to the intranet zone and also configure specific sites to be in the Intranet zone using this policy, the settings from both policies will apply.

Now, the learning points. This may work the same way that adding them manually to security zones works but I do pretty much everything by policy so I can't speak to that.

1. Adding named sites seems to work the same as the proxy exceptions list. You can add something like "*.cnn.com" to a specific zone and all pages at that website will be in that security zone.

2. Adding IP ranges seems to work a bit different than proxy exceptions do. For proxy exceptions, you can add something like "192.168.*" and all sites that begin with 192.168 (the entire class-B range) will be affected.

IP ranges don't work the same in this policy. You have to specify the exact ranges that you want the policy to apply to. To work with the class-B range listed above, you need to use the following: "192.168.1-255.1-255". If you just wanted to add a specific class-C, just use "192.168.10.1-255". This does actually give you some pretty good flexibility but it probably isn't anything that most people will need. (note: the policy explanation does say that you need to specify ranges, I just couldn't find anything about managing a class-B).

3. Differences in IE6 and IE7: The policy appears to function the same for either version of IE, but the user experience is a bit different. IE7 does it right--if you have this policy set for a security zone, everything is greyed out when you go to manage the sites in that security zone.

IE6 doesn't work quite as well. A user can still go into the settings for a security zone that is managed by this group policy and add sites/IP ranges. But, the settings don't stick. You can hit OK back out of all the internet settings windows and go right back in and the setting won't be there. So, it appears that XP SP2 was made smart enough to use the settings correctly...they just didn't get around to updating the Internet Options windows to grey everything out like most true group policy settings do. So, functionally it is fine under IE6--just possibly a bit confusing if you allow your users to access the security tab in the internet options.

So, kudos to Microsoft on this one. It works like a champ once you figure out the proper syntax for the policy settings.

EDIT: We have since discovered that if you use this policy to configure even 1 zone, it will affect the way that you can manage any and all security zones. So, if you only use this policy to manage the "Local Intranet" zone, anyone who gets the policy will be unable to manage sites in any of the security zones.

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Crikey! The Croc Hunter killed by a stingray

Matt Broadstock — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 07:41:00 GMT

Just saw this post... I spent 9 months down in Oz and it has to be one of the deadliest placest on the planet. You'd hear stories all the time of people getting killed by saltwater crocs, sharks, jellyfish, etc. On the land, not much safer. I may have it backwards but apparently they have the 10 deadliest spiders and 9 out of the 10 deadlist land snakes--or vice-versa. Heck, even the extremely strange platypus has poisonous barbs. And the friendly koala bear's favorite food--eucalyptus--is poisonous to humans.

I was actually lucky. There were two times I should have been killed while there. Once, (before I knew how incredibly poisonous everything was) I was tormenting a couple of snakes who were fighting and standing over the top of them taking pictures. Turns out they were taipans--only the world's deadliest land snake. I'm from Kansas, we grew up out in the country playing with snakes. Apparently, not such a good idea in Oz.

The other near-death experience was on beautiful Fraser Island. Long-story short. I was being followed down the beach at around midnight (still hiking, looking for a place to camp) by about 10 dingoes. Eventaully, I waded through a waist-deep washout from an inland stream and they decided to stop following me after a quite frightful 10 minutes of being stalked. Me vs. 10 dingoes...hmmm...not much of a chance there.

Steve Irwin was a bit of a nutter but he'll be missed. As crazy as some of the things he did were, he was an extremely intelligent guy who did things as safely as humanly possible.

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IE7 keyboard shortcuts

Matt Broadstock — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 16:24:00 GMT

I ran across this and figured I would share for the other people who like to use the keyboard as much as they can.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/attachment/715071.ashx

Also, something else funny...go to http://www.ie7.com/

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Last Active tab focus in IE7

Matt Broadstock — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 16:10:00 GMT

I ran across a tip to day to get my tabs working (closer to) the way I want them to. I'm loving IE7 but I miss the flexibility in tab management that FireFox has via extensions. My biggest complaint is that the tab focus doesn't change back to the previous tab that I had opened whenever I close a tab. I do lot's of techie research when I am trying to find solutions and often that involves doing a search and then opening up a bunch of windows in new tabs. But, if I don't want to keep a particular new tab open, it sends me to the tab to the right of the one I closed instead of the last active tab. Or, if the new tab is the one furthest right, tab focus goes to the tab that as next to it.

I was going to submit a feature request on the Microsoft feedback site but it appears I don't need to. They really need to change where this option is set at (move it to the Tabs settings page) but at least it is there!

I can't link to the tip because it was posted as a workaround by someone on the MS Feedback site.

Entered by yOlt on 5/18/2006

You can configure it working like you expected it to work. This option is just hidden very well.

1. Open tools menu in from Internet Explorer window, choose Internet Options...
2. Go to advanced tab, there will be anvanced settings.
3.Under Browsing you will find "Use Most recent order when switching tabswith Ctrl+Tab (3rd last option). Check it and it will work like you wanted although it wont directly say it.
My opinion is that this option should be under tab options. And the text should be changed in that case to something else for easier to understand.

EDIT: This link had the info all along. Like the option itself, it just isn't explained very well.

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Determining date format/regional settings in .Net

Matt Broadstock — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 18:38:00 GMT

I've looked for ways to do this for the longest time and I must say I was surprised that no one had a good way. All of the solutions I found were extremely complicated and didn't work all of the time.

Basically, my problem was that I had some date string that was formatted in a specific way (yyyymmddHHMMSS.mmmmmm) and I needed to be able to work with that date. I needed to convert that to a valid date variable type so I could do some date math (it was just a string data type). That would be easy but I need it to work internationally so I can't just parse the string and do a:

strDate = mm & "-" & dd & "-" & yyyy

If I do that on a system that has its regional settings set to something that expects dd-mm-yyyy I will be working with the wrong date, right? I've had this idea in my head for a while but just hadn't gotten around to testing it. It seems to work great though so I figured I would share it.

Basically, I am just converting a specific date that uses the WORD for the month to a string. Then, I just do some string processing to figure out whether the first 2 characters are for the month or for the day.

Obviously, first I have to get each individual part out:

Dim yyyy As String : yyyy = WMITime.Substring(0, 4)
Dim mm As String : mm = Mid(WMITime, 5, 2) 'Month
Dim dd As String : dd = Mid(WMITime, 7, 2) 'Day
Dim hh As String : hh = Mid(WMITime, 9, 2) 'hour
Dim mn As String : mn = Mid(WMITime, 11, 2) 'minutes
Dim ss As String : ss = Mid(WMITime, 13, 2) 'seconds

Here's the good stuff!

Try
Dim dtmTestDate As Date : dtmTestDate = CDate("January 5, 2000")
Dim strTestDate As String : strTestDate = dtmTestDate.ToShortDateString
WriteLogEntry(vbTab & "Testdate: " & strTestDate, 1)
Select Case True
Case strTestDate.Substring(0, 2) = "05" Or strTestDate.Substring(0, 1) = "5" ' Non-US
  strDateFormat = "NonUS"
Case strTestDate.Substring(0, 2) = "01" Or strTestDate.Substring(0, 1) = "1" ' US
  strDateFormat = "US"
Case Else
  strDateFormat = "UNKNOWN"
End Select

Catch ex As Exception
Call ErrorHandler("ERROR: Cannot determine date format settings", Err, ex)
End Try

I needed to work with the dates multiple times in a loop of code somewhere else. That's why I didn't just set my dates once in the code above. I just figured out what the date format was so I could do what I needed with it in my loop.

Select Case strDateFormat

Case "US"
strDate = mm & "-" & dd & "-" & yyyy
Case "NonUS"
strDate = dd & "-" & mm & "-" & yyyy
Case Else

End Select

Then, I combine that with the time (the format doesn't change for this if you have different regional settings--at least as far as I know)

Dim strTime As String = hh & ":" & mn & ":" & ss

CDate(strDate & " " & strTime)

Ta-da! I can now get the correct date regardless of the regional settings that it is running on. This means I don't have to maintain two separate versions depending on where the software will be used.

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Bought a new MP3 player today

Matt Broadstock — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 22:51:00 GMT

I went ahead and pulled the trigger on the Creative Labs Zen Vision:M. I haven't gotten to use it much yet but it seems great so far. The video is really crisp and the colors are vibrant. I went to Circuit City to buy it but the price buying it at the store was $299 for just the player. There is a special bundle on their website that includes the player, the power supply, and a case for $291. Pretty much a no-brainer there. I just got onto one of their computers and bought the thing online and walked over to customer service to pick it up.

I went ahead and loaded up Media Player 11 as well because it was supposed to sync up easier (don't have to install the Creative software). Man, WMP11 is sweet! I'm sure I haven't found all of the new stuff that it can do but it is obvious that a lot of the changes are to make working with MP3 players much easier. There are a couple of things I have to get used to but I doubt it will take long.

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Vista Group Policies overview available for download

Matt Broadstock — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 17:43:00 GMT

You can download it here. Although they are adding a few of the policies that have they should've included with XP SP1 or SP2, they still haven't totally replaced the IE Branding CSE (client-side extension). I've run into so many bugs with that thing that we just write custom ADMs to handle everything that it does. (that particular bug didn't get resolved until 5 months after it was reported to MS--so, no SP2 upgrades during that time if you were redirecting your App Data)

So, it appears that you will still have to either use a custom ADM or the always-buggy CSE to set something as simple as the Proxy Server.

But, it does look like they've added a lot of Vista-specific settings. Apparently they have gone from 1671 to 2450 available settings. I suppose I'll have to setup Vista in a domain environment to see how handy the new settings are. Also, it looks like they have things split up very nicely with the new ADMX format. I didn't count them all but it looks like there are a good 40-50 of them.

Also, as long as I am talking about Group Policy, I just ran across this GP Wiki. They have an "I Want To" page. I think I'll put a few things on there.

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Google for the word "Failure"

Matt Broadstock — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 21:06:00 GMT

Someone told me about this today.. I found it quite funny.

Just do a search for the word failure and look at the first hit:

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Pluto no longer a planet

Matt Broadstock — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 14:41:00 GMT

Wow! I never expected this. I've kind of been following what has been going on with their discussions on redefining what is and isn't a planet. But, it seemed that just about every option that they were considering was going to increase the number of planets, not kick Pluto out of our little planetary gang. I guess they figured that since they coudn't agree on whether to have 10 planets or 50, they had to make some change.

Kids are going to have to come up with a new way to memorize the planets. But, instead of the 12 that article talks about, they'll have it even easier. I guess "My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas" won't work anymore. Maybe our energetic moms can start serving up some noodles instead..?

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Troubleshooting application issues in a domain environment

Matt Broadstock — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 21:35:00 GMT

I figured I would share a slightly modified version of some documentation I threw together for my current client.

I swear..you can troubleshoot 95% of application issues this way! You just have to be methodical about it.

It details how to troubleshoot problems like:

XXX application works fine for everyone but one user on a specific system
XXX application never works for a specific user no matter which system they logon to
XXX application doesn’t work for anyone on a specific system
XXX application only works for admins on a specific system

http://blogcastrepository.com/blogs/mattbro/articles/2034.aspx

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Anyone else getting a ton of referrals from poker sites?

Matt Broadstock — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 07:02:00 GMT

I just went through my referrals for my articles/posts and a large number of them have tons and tons of referrals from some stupid texas hold 'em site. Anyone else seeing this as well? They seem to have about 150 different domain names for their site but it is pretty obvious that it is all one website. It isn't the end of the world or anything but I like to see how people are finding my posts and they certainly clutter everything up.

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Fixed an annoying problem with running out of GDI Objects

Matt Broadstock — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 19:10:00 GMT

I've had a problem with my desktop for a while now..It appeared that I was running out of resources and I kept having to close apps down in order to open up new windows or access menu items. This was happening even though I still had tons of free available memory. I tried running some memory cleanup tools, changing my pagefile settings (smaller/bigger, fixed size/let windows handle it, etc). Unfortunately, nothing fixed my problem. As a side note, I've run into this before occasionally but lately it has been horrible. It really seemed to get worse when I installed IE7 although I did have the issue a few times when I used FireFox.

Anyway, today I was trying to help someone out with a scripting issue and I kept having to close the windows I needed open. I was finally fed up. I needed to fix this problem or rebuild my system.

Thankfully, I think I found the fix. It has to do with running out of 'GDI Objects'. I opened up Task Manager and added the column so I could view GDI Objects and was not surprised at all to see the my IE processes were using up more than anything else. I usually keep 3-4 separate IE processes running and have 3-5 tabs open in each of them. Now, I don't really care that IE is using them..I just want to run my freaking applications. (Here's a link to someone more knowledgable than I complaining about IE7's usage of GDI objects though). It's a shame to have all of this memory if Windows only puts a small amount of it into a critical area. Thankfully there is a hotfix and a reghack to help with the problem. The hotfix is just to help with a specific problem with Themes in Windows. I went ahead and installed it but that doesn't really fix my problem. I need to increase the amount of memory available for these troublesome GDI Objects.

The reghack details how to go about changing the settings. It affects more than just GDI Objects, it affects the "Desktop Heap". I don't know exactly what that is nor do I care at the moment.

Anyway, I ended up changing my settings from:

Windows SharedSection=1024,3072,512

to:

Windows SharedSection=1024,8192,2048

I went ahead and opened up 5 separate IE processes with 7-8 tabs each, MOM admin, MOM operator, ADSIEdit, AD MMC, GPMC, PrimalScript, Lotus Notes, etc and I am running without any problems at all.

My question is this, what's the point of having all of this RAM if you still can't open up all of the stuff you want to? Maybe Microsoft needs to re-think the default settings for that registry entry now that people have more RAM in their systems. Or at least give you an easier way to change it like they've done with the 'performance' options that you can choose from in a number of Control Panel applets.

EDIT: I couldn't be happier! I can open up as much as I want to now! Also, I was just explaining my joy at fixing this problem to a co-worker and he mentioned that a new clinical application that my current client is starting to implement seems to eat up GDI resources as well. The problem is so bad that they install a special GDI Object monitor to let you know when you are close to running out of them. Once again, I ask the question, why not just increase how many are available?!?!? Maybe there is a downside to the reg changes I made...I guess I'll find out eventually if there is. Unfortunately, there are a ton of web sites that talk about monitoring GDI objects and how to prevent leaks but there doesn't seem to be a lot of information on making a change like the one that I did.

EDIT #2 - I found a nice article that describes it a lot better. I just had to start searching for "Desktop Heap" instead of "GDI Objects" and I found some pretty good resources. There is a link to a good forum thread at the end of the 3rd page of the article discussing this issue a bit further as well. Apparently there shouldn't be any real negative affects to my change. Apparently you can adjust the total size of the Desktop Heap from the default of 48 MB using the following reg value:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\SessionViewSize

I have no need to mess with that since I just care about my XP desktop but it is handy information to know in case I run into anything like this again.

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