Nothing temporary about temporary files.

While I was writing this the operating system informed me that I had run out of space on Drive C, my system drive. That was surprising because I had gone through a cleanup routine just a few days ago. I had no more obvious places to go to get back space, so it was time to run my Find Large Files script. This time it didn't find much that I could delete, but I watched as it ran, it showed me the names of thousands and thousands of files I couldn't find browsing around the file system. Then I realized — they must be hidden files. In a deeply nested sub-folder of Documents and Settings called Temp. I flipped the bit and sure enough there they were. The thousands of one-pixel gif web bugs, and all the Shockwaves, gigabytes of them, that I had looked at since I bought this computer many months ago. In other words Windows just consumes disk space. I wonder if Microsoft bought some stock in one of the disk drive makers. This is just appalling. How is a regular user supposed to find these files? Why should they have to? As we use MP3 more and more, do we need to write some utilities for people that make their systems perform better? (BTW, I'm sure Scoble will say “That's fixed in Longhorn.”)

[Scripting News]

After reading this post I examined my temp directory and found it full of useless files. The biggest culprit was IE5 files which somehow had never gottem deleted by the various disk cleanup programs. Since I had manually run Norton's Fast & Safe Cleanup I was a little disappointed. I deleted the files manually from my temp directory and the windows temp directory.

An interesting plea to get weblogs registered with an ISSN number. I understand the concept but I am not sure what the practical advantage of having an ISSN is. I'll have to read it again.

I created some custom Outlook forms to automate some of my sales response tasks and then Outlook started to complain about the item contains active content that cannot be displayed in the preview pane. Today I finally found an answer in the M$ knowlegebase article, Q331788. It said I needed to apply a hotfix and manually edit the registry. I checked the file versions and my files are up to date. As much as I dislike editing the registry this fix cleaned up the problem.

Yesterday I figured out my problem with the task scheduler under Windows XP. Norton Anti-virus's NDETECT.EXE would run once or twice while I was active on the computer. If the computer's password protected screensaver was active, it would not run. It would fail with a: “0x80070569: Logon failure: the user has not been granted the requested logon type at this computer. Verify that the task's Run-as name and password are valid and try again.”  I would re-enter the userid and password and try again. It would work.

It finally clicked for me when I was checking the security log file. It was generating a 534 audit failure for logon type 4. Logon type 4 is a batch logon. A quick check of the GPO showed that my userid was not authorized to logon as a batch job. I was surprised since I was a member of the administrator group.

This should clean up my problems with the Quickbooks weekly backup and Norton Anti-Virus.

Sunday Mirror.

Saddam – Eager to strike a deal?

Saddam Hussein has been in secret negotiations with US forces in Iraq for the past nine days, we can reveal.

The Iraqi dictator is demanding safe passage to the former Soviet republic of Belarus. In exchange, he has vowed to provide information on weapons of mass destruction and disclose bank accounts where he siphoned off tens of millions of dollars in plundered cash.

President Bush is being kept abreast of the extraordinary talks by his National Security advisor Condoleezza Rice. She is co-ordinating negotiations in Baghdad which are led by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of American forces in Iraq.

The United States has vowed never to negotiate with Saddam and want to take him dead or alive, but the White House hopes the clandestine talks will allow them to pinpoint the tyrant's exact location.

Paul Martin
Sunday Mirror

Situation:
After you install Norton AntiVirus (NAV), you notice that none of the tasks in Microsoft Task Scheduler, including Automatic LiveUpdate, are running as expected. You examined the Scheduled Tasks and notice that all of your tasks, including Symantec NetDetect, show a status of “Could not start.”

The rest of the article gives you a how to fix your configuration. Check it for details.

I ended up using scenario 2 with limited success. It appears to reschedule itself to run in 4 hours if it was successful. If it fails it leaves a message of “Could not start” in the Scheduler. Logging off and back on appears to fix the problem.

I received an email purportedly from Microsoft on Friday. It was suspicous because the email address was wrong. When I examined it under Yahoo I found the attachment contained an executable file. I let Yahoo scan if for a virus and it told me it was a worm so I deleted it. Today I found out it is called swen. For more info read this article at SearchSecurity.com, http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid14_gci928518,00.html.