Use Dan Pollock’s hosts file, which is kept up to date regularly, to prevent your computer from connecting to selected
internet hosts. This is an excellent way to protect your PC from buckets of spyware, prevent a load of ad-based pop-up traps, and prevent those damn “web bugs” embedded in spam from contacting their sites for user tracking etc.
This block-list provides good protection to IE from certain web-based exploits and blocks most advertising you would otherwise be subjected to on the internet.

All you need do is copy and paste all the text on Dan’s page (except the last line which is the file’s date) into your own hosts file. Remember to do this fairly regularly. This will even bring down your bandwidth use a bit. Even add your own entries to keep your machine from accessing various sites for Parental or other reasons.

Not sure about using hosts files? It’s safe and easy, have a look at a wiki or even a quick how-to article or try these instructions if you’re unfortunate enough to run Vista.

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I installed Ubuntu Feisty Fawn on my Compaq NC6000 which has an Intel PRO 2200BG wireless card. Could not connect at all to my home network (WPA-PSK encrypted network running off a Netgear Access Point). The laptop could not even see any networks even after I enabled the SSID to be broadcast from the router.

The following fix got it to work:

sudo apt-get install wpasupplicant      (Feisty Fawn already has this installed though)

sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome network-manager

sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces  (Comment out everything other than “lo” entries in that file and save the file)

Create a file called /etc/default/wpasupplicant, add entry ENABLED=0 and save the file

sudo touch /etc/default/wpasupplicant

Reboot your system or use the following command

sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart

Left-clicking the network manager on the top of the screen then showed all networks in the vicinity. I was then able to select my network, configure and enter the password. Once this was done I could re-hide the SSID on my router.

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MSN Messenger was not working unable to connect once I had installed it on a PC running Vista. It was just displaying the error code 81000306.

This is due to Vista’s tcpip auto-tuning feature which can be controlled with the netsh command (you will have to open the command window with Admin privileges though):

To Disable Autotuning:
netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

If you think you need it turned back on:
netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal

Or merely want to check what it is currently set to:
netsh interface tcp show global

I didn’t have to restart my machine after disabling autotuning. MSN Messenger just kicked in almost right away.

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Problem:
Right-clicking a file or folder in Vista in order to see the properties or perform an additional action was causing explorer.exe  to stop responding and attempt in vain to restart. This is beyond annoying and plagued my vista installation for hours. Obviously something in the context menu (the little menu that pops up when your right-click) was not behaving.

The fix:
Normally, in order to see the shell extensions that are running one could use ShellExView, sort the view by type, disable all the context menu process one by one, trying to right-click a file in explorer each time until you disable the offending extension.

Vista however, needs ShellExView to run as an administrator and I could not right-click ShellExView in order to run this program with elevated rights, so…. catch22 situation there.

So to i had to do it the manual way: I opened Regedit and backed up the following keys:
HKCR \*\shellex\contextmenuhandlers
HKCR\AllFileSystemObjects\shellex\contextmenuhandlers
HKCR\Folder\shellex\contextmenuhandlers
HKCR\Directory\shellex\contextmenuhandlers
HKCR\shellex\contextmenuhandlers
HKCR\Directory\Background\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers

Then went through each one, deleting the sub-keys one by one till i disabled the dodgy shell extension.
Each time I deleted a subkey, I’d reopen windows explorer, right click a file and if it bombed, i’d delete the next subkey and repeat the process. Once I found the offending process, I re-imported the .reg files I’d created when backing up the keys then I deleted just the sub-key that was the issue.

In my case it was a FGMenu.dll which I suspect is for a fingerprint-reading USB Key i use fairly often.

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Error: The SMS Virtual Keyboard driver is preventing the machine from entering standby mode. Please close all applications and try again. If problem persists you may need to update the driver.

This usually means the machine is running two clashing Graphics Software packages.
Common offenders are: Adobe Type Manager, Adobe Framemaker, Adobe PhotoDownloader.

First fix suggestion would be to uninstall Adobe Type Manager.

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