Birthday wishes and bookkeeping

A belated happy birthday to Sam Gentile! I'll leave out the "old man" comments, I recently turned 35 and 40 isn't that far away. Happy birthday to Justin Rudd as well, Justin I hope you get the present you're wishing for.
Oh, and here's your link, Greg! I'm number 78. Interestingly, one of my referrers today was perl C++ Gordon Weakliem. To the requester: if you're looking for a page I did on embedding Active State Perl in an application, don't bother. That info was for an ancient version (from 1996) and has been made obsolete by the GS port of Perl and later versions from Active State. I think that page is still listed in some of the Perl Win32 FAQs, but it's all out of date.

— Gordon Weakliem at permanent link

I've had it too.

Sam Gentile say's that he's had it with XP. Add me to that list, IE6 has soiled itself yet again. Here's the symptoms:
  1. I can't Print from IE anymore (I get the following message: 'dialogArguments.__IE_PrintType' is null or not an object.)
  2. <a target="_blank">, <form target="blank">, and window.open() don't work. window.open() fails with "access is denied"
  3. I can't drag and drop files into any folder, my Desktop, an Explorer window or Internet Explorer.
  4. I can't open up the Search page from the taskbar Start menu.
  5. Certain MSI installers now fail while initializing.
  6. I can no longer save web pages from IE (File | Save As) - the error is "the web page could not be saved to the selected location"
  7. Outlook will no longer deliver new messages to my personal folders (on my local hard drive), and if I'm operating out of my personal folders, I can't send mail (the error is something like "the requested operation is not allowed" when I try to send.
  8. The disk defragmenter no longer works.
This link on Google Groups describes similar problems. I've tried several of the fixes recommended, but haven't pursued all of them because nobody's acknowleged that any of them work. Somebody mentioned that installing "the latest JVM" worked, but no joy there. Also tried reregistering a bunch of IE dlls, as recommended in a couple KB articles. I am logged in under my domain account and that account is a member of Administrators. When this problem occurs, it is machine wide - that is, all users are affected. This has now happened to me 4 times on 3 machines, twice on XP, twice on 2000. This problem is incredibly aggravating. This is now happening with enough regularity that I don't want to repave, as I believe it's just going to happen again. Today, I was configuring COM+ security when I noticed that this problem had started up again. It certainly seems security related, at first blush. I just don't have the time or patience to figure this out.

— Gordon Weakliem at permanent link