Avatar Tech Blog

Had a problem today with a machine running Windows XP when attaching PDF documents in Outlook 2007 that it would just hang. I could attach other document type like Word and Excel. The culprit once again was Adobe Reader X. Uninstalling Adobe Reader X and installing Adobe Reader 9.5 fixed the issue. I did some more testing and was able to fix the issue also by changing how Outlook previews documents.

You can turn off document preview by going to, tools, trust center, clicking on attachment handling, and checking the box ‘Turn Off Attachment Preview’

Recently had someone trying to print from a Windows 7 64 bit computer to a print queue on a machine that was running Windows XP 32 bit and could not get the 64 bit drivers loaded for it. To get around this I created a local port on the Windows 7 computer to the Windows XP print queue.

To add that port go to Devices and Printers, click on add a printer, add a local printer, click on create a new port and leave ‘local port’ selected.

Click on Next and it will bring up a small dialogue box and you just put in the computer name that you want to connect to and the name of the print queue on that computer. You do you need to have it in the \\ format:

Click OK and from there and then next. From there it will let you add a print driver as normal.

Today someone called and the scanned documents that they had received were really slow to print. Something like 1 page every 5 minutes. The first thing that I tried was to use a different printer and then to use a different print driver changing for PCL6 to postscript. I thought it might actually be Adobe Reader and tested that by installing Foxit PDF Reader and was able to print the document quickly. The user wanted to stay with Adobe Reader so I decided to download Adobe Reader 9 from oldapps.com and that was also able to print just fine.

Had a problem with the AOL Desktop on Windows 7 where after install it changed all of the shortcuts on the computer to try and open with AOL. I looked at the entries in the registry that I thought would effect the .lnk files at HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\lnkfile\shell\open\command and HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.lnk, but they looked good to me. I compared them against my registry and also the reg file located at this post about .lnk files
and everything looked good.

What I learned is that there is yet another registry that controls file associations that is for individual users on the machine – This is also known as the “Open With List” in Windows. That is located at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.lnk\OpenWithList

In that key I deleted the entry that was “a – reg_sz – waol.exe”

Restarting the computer changed all of the icons for the shortcuts back to normal.

Thanks again to those of you who provided us feedback on our Computer Consulting website. I also want to thank Jonathan Weisberg at Weisberg Web Design who did a great job. He understood my requirements, the look and feel that I was after, and got the job done quickly.

We have updated the look of our IT Consulting website. Please check it out and give us your feedback!

We saw a malware / scareware tactic today that we had not seen for a while. What happened is that Win 7 Antispyware 2011 infected a machine and changed the registry so that any file with the .exe extension would actually try and launch the virus.

We looked at Windows Task Manager and saw a process named mpx.exe (you might see a different name file on your machine). When we searched through the registry we saw that it was referenced at HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile\shell\open\command default=C:\users\username\AppData\Local\mpx.exe –a “%1” %*

To fix the issue we deleted the file C:\users\username\AppData\Local\mpx.exe and changed HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile\shell\open\command default=C:\users\username\AppData\Local\mpx.exe –a “%1” %* to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile\shell\open\command default=“%1” %*

We also had to change the following registry key back:  HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.exe default=exefile