Penguin
Recent Changes
Note: You are viewing an old revision of this page. View the current version.

Wondering what all those weird processes are?

This page lists lots of common programs and tells you what they do.. so next time you see something like 'tikl.exe' running and you're wondering what that might be, here's a good place to go look it up.

Blank Explorer windows on dual CPU servers

Got a Windows 2000 Server that displays blank Explorer windows until you refresh or right click inside them? Recently updated to 2 CPUs (and installed the Multiprocessor HAL)?

You need Patch KB:328310 (MS02-071), even if you've installed it already.

Can't authenticate users in a trusted domain for RRAS/VPN

See this thread, to which the ultimate outcome seemed to be that you have to add the other DC to the group "Pre-Windows 2000 Compatible Users" on the DC
net localgroup "Pre-Windows 2000 Compatible Access" everyone /add

See KB:240855.

Windows 2000 Tab Completion

Everyone loves TabCompletion. Enabled in the command processor in Windows XP, it was introduced in Windows 2000 but not implemented.

  • Run Regedit (Start, Run, Regedit)
  • Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Command Processor\
  • Double click !CompletionChar? and change whatever is there with '9' (ASCII value for Tab). Click OK.

You'll have to restart any cmd.exe's you might have open to have them notice the change.

Remote restart/shutdown a WinNT/2K/XP machine

See SysInternal's PsTools for the PsShutdown utility, that can use RPC to shut down a computer locally or remotely. Or for the same thing look at the apropriate ResourceKit? for the OS.

There are also other programs that can use RPC to shut down your computer remotely. Just don't patch your machine, and sooner or later your machine will shut down after 60 seconds warning.

Print drivers cause crashing

Sometimes you'll find that, when starting Word or Excel, you'll jump to 100% CPU usage, half the application, half spoolsv. You can get into the app using 'net stop spooler', but you can't do much and printing is out of the question.

An answer from Mark Henri, Excel guru: If you try installing a different print driver and print to screen and it works, then it's the print driver. You'll need to contact the printer manufacturer and see if they have an updated one. If it's across a network, there could be problems with that too that get fairly involved to troubleshoot.