If’ you ever need to modify your Hosts file on either Windows 7 or Windows Vista, you’ll probably hit a warning that you need to be an Administrator to modify it?

Now this may seem odd as you’ve also probably already got Administrative rights on the PC?

This is a new safety measure originally introduced in Vista to stop rogue (spyware) applications from modifying hosts and redirecting traffic to other sites.

However, you can still modify the file:

Right Click on “Command Prompt” icon, and select “Run as Administrator”

cd \windows\system32\drivers\etc

notepad hosts

You should now be able to save the file without any problems.

This happens fairly regularly at a client site with a mixture of XP and Vista PCs.    It’s common for users to remote from an XP machine to a Vista machine, only to find that when they return to the Vista machine, the screen is blank (black) and there’s no way to bring it back to life without switching it off and rebooting.

Believe it or not, it appears that the problem is related to smart card authentication (which isn’t even used on the site).   On the machine establishing the connection – go into the remote desktop properties, under the Local Resources tab, press the More button.   If you deselect “Smart Cards” – the problem is fixed

There is a long discussion of the problem with other possible solutions over at asp.net if the above fix doesn’t work for you.

I’ve seen this a couple of times now with Vista, and thankfully it’s a fairly straightforward fix:

Log on as another user with Administrative rights.

Start regedit and go to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

Here you’ll see a list of SIDs for each user profile, and you should find there are two with the same SID, however one ends with “.bak”.   You need to swap these around – essentially restoring the backup SID.

Once swapped – set both State and Refcount to 0 and then reboot. Fingers crossed, everything should be back to normal!

For a good step through of the process – take a look at this walkthrough.

I’ve seen a couple of machines reporting this error now recently.   Looking on google I’m not alone as there appear to be reports popping up all over the place!

The most successful solution I’ve seen so far is to download each update and manually install it.   I’m still searching for a better solution as this could be very tedious for a lot of PCs!   I’ll report back when I have further information.

For now – here is some further reading:

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vistawu/thread/6daddbdd-f7b5-4ea0-9dd8-807d2954beba

http://forums.techarena.in/windows-update/1270535.htm

This one took some investigation!

The Vista PC in question had 6 Windows Updates all failing with the same error code : 0x80071a2c. After several attempts at rebooting and installing the updates, I decided to delve deeper.

Looking in c:\windows\windowsupdate.log I found the following errors:

WARNING: Got extended error: “POQ Operation HardLinkFile OperationData \SystemRoot\WinSxS\x86_microsoft-windows-help-browser.resources_31bf3856ad364e35_8.0.6001.18702_he-il_9475a540718490ed\browser.h1s, \??\C:\Windows\Help\Windows\he-IL\browser.h1s”

Now, from what I found, the POQ error is due to Windows Update creating a hardlink between the two “browser.h1s” file locations specified above.

But the source file above doesn’t exist in the winsxs folder?   At this point I had a guess..   The file mentions “browser.resources” and also “8.0″.    Could this be Internet Explorer 8.0?   If so – it isn’t installed on the machine and could explain the error.

So..   Installed IE 8 and the patches then went on fine!

I’m often being asked this.   People assume that Office XP will only work with Windows XP – a cunning marketing plan by MS?

Office XP will run on Windows Vista fine.

If you’ve suddenly lost the ability to hibernate your PC in Vista, here’s the fix:

1) Start an Administrator command prompt (Start, All Programs, Accessories – right click on command prompt and select “Run as Administrator”).

2) Type “powercfg /hibernate on”   (without the quotes)

3) Reboot

The option should be available again now!

The last post reminded me..

Try and run telnet on vista and you’ll be greeted with a “command not found”

It’s easiyresolved – can be added using programs and features (yup – premove programs with a different name).

But why has it been removed?  I can’t see it as a security flaw? A telnet “server” – yes, but a telnet client??

At least it’s still in there somewhere….