I am not the only one.

Nifty.

Vista screwed itself over

Clicking on Learn More Online took me Microsoft’s Genuine Advantage validation site, which happily reported that my copy of Vista isn’t genuine, with error code 0xc004d401. It was convinced that I had some kind of incompatible software that was interfering with validation, and gave me a list of anti-virus and malware checker programs that have been known to cause this problem. Obviously, I had none of them, or at all, ever.

It turns out that this was caused by Vista hosing itself while trying to update to SP1. I’m not sure if it’s caused specifically by SP1, or any of the updates that I installed before SP1, but actually getting SP1 to install fixes the problem. Microsoft’s suggestion to reboot into safe mode won’t help, because you can run neither WGA, or Windows Update from there. Luckily, It doesn’t take much to circumvent the lockout.

1. Click on Learn More Online
2. Type in “file:///c:”, without the quotes. This will get you into Explorer.
3. Use the Folders pane to navigate to the Control Panel, at the bottom.
4. Use the little arrow to expand it, and open Windows Update.
5. Check for updates. If you have SP1 waiting for you, download and install.

If that doesn’t work for you, or SP1 doesn’t show up as an update, then you likely have a different problem. You can still make life easier for yourself by navigating to the Windows directory and from there launching Explorer.exe, which will give you your desktop back. Some things will be disabled, and you’ll have a memory quota that’ll only allow you to launch two or three programs at a time, but it’ll make troubleshooting a bit less painful.

I installed SP1 and the problem went away, and Windows validates fine now. I was tipped off to a failed SP1 install being the culprit, because there was a task in the Task Scheduler that called for a “HitmanSp1.exe” (which didn’t exist) to be launched. Microsoft, your killers fail again!

Flat directory view in Vista Explorer

I’ve always wanted this feature in Explorer, but it’s one of those things that only some .001% of the users might care for (so obviously, Linux has it). It’s handy for a lot of things like publishing websites, browsing through large codebases, or visually scanning through documents. Dreamweaver, for example, uses a flat tree view in its site manager, and it integrates it with FTP synchronization, that lets you publish any file to its respective location on the server in one click.

Dreamewaver Site Manager

I’d love a stand-alone “site manager” application that could do this, but I can’t find anything that works this well. I’d just have to give it a base local folder, and the FTP information for the remote folder, and it would handle all of the synchronizing for me. It should keep track of what was uploaded and when, because synchronization programs that rely on modification time often get it wrong, and take ages to figure out what to upload.