If any of the System Icons such as the Speaker, Network, or Power icons are missing from the Taskbar Notification Area (Systray) in Windows Vista or Windows XP, try the following steps to try to bring them back.

1. Open Regedit by holding down the Windows Key and press the R key. Type regedit in the box and click OK.

2. Click My Computer on the top left side.

3. Click Edit > Find.

4. Type iconstreams and click Find.

5. If Regedit finds an entry named iconstreams, press the Delete button on your keyboard to delete it.

6. Press the F3 key on your keyboard to continue searching the registry. If Regedit finds any additional entries, delete those as well.

7. Repeat steps 2 through 6, only this time instead of searching for iconstreams, search for PastIconStreams instead, and delete any of those entries.

8. Close the registry editor and restart the computer. See if your System icons have reappeared in the Taskbar Notification Area (Systray).

See also: Systray icons missing

In Windows 2003 and Windows XP, you are unable to view the data in files with an extension of CHM (Microsoft Compiled HTML Help file) from a network resource. Security patches prevent this and you get an error that says:

Navigation to the webpage was canceled

or

This program cannot display the webpage

In order to make this work, you have to add the UNC path to the server where the files are stored to your trusted sites in Internet Options within Internet Explorer. Here’s how:

1. Open Internet Explorer and click Tools > Internet Options.

2. Click the Security tab.

3. Click Trusted Sites.

4. Click Default Level.

5. Set the Allowed levels for this zone to Low.

6. Click Sites.

Read more… »

In Windows XP and Windows 2000, you may have a problem opening the Computer icon in Component Services (Dcomcnfg). When trying to open it, instead nothing happens and it automatically closes the entire window and disappears.

Try the following things to solve this issue.

1. Click Start > Run and type regsvr32 ole32.dll and click OK.

Try it now. If it doesn’t work, go to step 2.

2. Click Start > Run and type regedit and click OK.

3. Navigate to the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\COM3

4. Delete the COM3 folder. Close the registry editor.

5. Open Start > Settings > Control Panel.

6. Open Add/Remove Programs.

7. Click Add/Remove Windows Components.

8. Click Next through the wizard. No need to check anything first. You may be prompted for a Windows Installation CD.

9. Restart the computer and try Component Services again.

If that doesn’t work, you may want to explore certain programs that may have corrupted this option. Some have reported that uninstalling McAfee or Nero products have fixed the issue.

See Also:

PRB: Cannot Expand “My Computer” in Component Services MMC Snap-In

McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.0i Update Problems

My boss tends to judge when employees have arrived at work by when they make it into GoogleTalk. Since I am late all the time, I’m going to setup GoogleTalk to start every weekday morning at 8:00am. Here’s how I did it.

1. Click Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Scheduled Tasks. This screen will appear. Click Next.

2. Select the program you want to schedule to be launched. Click Next.

Read more… »

Today I had a problem going when I clicked on the System Restore tab under System Properties on my Windows XP system. When I would click it, System Properties would crash with a System Error. Here’s how I fixed this problem.

1. Open the Control Panel.

2. Open Administrative Tools.

3. Open on Services.

4. Open System Restore Service on the right side.

5. Click Stop.

6. Let the service stop, then click OK.

Now you should be able to access the System Restore tab. Uncheck the Turn off system restore on all drives if you would like to enable the System Restore feature again.

I recently had a problem with Windows XP. I needed to create a simple text file in a directory. However, when I clicked on File > New, Text Document wasn’t showing in the menu. Neither was Wordpad Document, or Notepad document.

I tried the registry hack to add this at TweakXP, but that didn’t help me. Then I tried installing Tweak UI for Windows XP and played with the Templates option in there. I added Wordpad Document, but it still didn’t show up at all when I went to create a new text document.

Then it suddenly occurred to me that I had recently installed a third party notepad program recently. I didn’t like it, so I uninstalled it. Could that have jacked up my file associations? I opened My Computer > Tools > Folder Options > File Types. Sure enough, that was it. Windows XP had lost file associations for TXT files.

I highlighted TXT in the list and clicked Change. I then selected WordPad. I then had the option for WordPad Document listed when I clicked on File > New.

Want to insert a registered trademark or copyright symbol or other type of character in your Windows document? You can use the Character Map. It works with almost any Windows application allowing you to add characters into your Word document, email message, etc. Here’s how.

1. Place the cursor where you would like the character to appear in your document.

2. Click Start > Accessories > System Tools > Character Map.

3. The Character Map appears. Select the Font you wish to use at the top of the window. then you can select any of the different types of characters, logos and symbols including the copyright © and trademark ® symbols.

4. Double-click on the character you would like to insert into your document. The character will be added to the Characters to copy box.

5. Click the Copy button.

6. Close the Character Map and in your document you can Paste the character into your document. Usually you can do this by clicking Edit > Paste or holding down Ctrl while pressing V.

One bad thing about this feature is that I didn’t find the Artist Formerly Known as Prince logo.

A feature that gets often overlooked is the ability to limit the hours that a printer is available to users. Let’s say you don’t want Al in Accounting to be able to print out flyers for his party on the high quality color printer after hours. You can lock down your printer during certain hours in Windows XP and Windows Vista. You will of course need administrator rights to do this.

1. Click Start > Control Panel > Printer.

2. Right-click on the icon for your printer and select Properties.

3. Click on the Advanced tab.

4. Select the option for Available from and you can set the hours you would like to keep the printer available to other users.

5. Click OK when done.

When you run IPCONFIG on a Windows XP computer, you may get the following error:

The system will need to be restarted after this is done.

When you print a document to the Microsoft XPS Document Writer you may get the following error message:

The location of the setting where you enable the single-click of icons to open them always escapes me. I can never find it when I want to change it on my Mom’s computer. Single-click irritates me, but here’s how to enable or disable it in Windows XP and Windows Vista.

3. Check the option for Single click to open an item to enable single-click to open items. Check Double-click to open item to disable the single-click feature.

Does browsing the network for shares take forever? There is a setting that disables checking for scheduled tasks when browsing the network. This can speed up things considerably if you’re on a larger network. This hack works on Windows 2000/2003/XP and Vista.

After you restart the computer, network browsing should be faster.

How to create custom shortcuts to launch applications in Windows XP and Vista.

You get an error message when trying to install Windows Updates on your Windows XP or Windows 2000 computer.

Problem: A problem on your computer is preventing updates from being downloaded or installed.

Here’s how to solve the problem:

1. Click Start > Run and type regsvr32 wuapi.dll

2. When you receive the message that the DLL has been registered, click OK and perform the same steps for each of the following commands under Start > Run:

regsvr32 wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 wucltui.dll
regsvr32 wups2.dll
regsvr32 wups.dll
regsvr32 wuweb.dll

Disable the feature that highlights programs that have just been installed.

4. Check or uncheck the box for Highlight Newly Installed Program and click OK then OK again.