Customer had complained he was seeing his domain (we’ll call it domain.tld just to be on the same page), several workgroups, and several other connections he wasn’t sure about.

So I fired up my trusty XP virtual machine (workgroup) to view all the workgroup computers in the Microsoft Windows Network (My Computer — My Network Places — View Workgroup Computers — Microsoft Windows Network). I could see “Domain.tld”, “Workgroup”, and “Workgroup1”. Now you should be able to open each of these up and list the systems that belong to the groups, but I wanted to know more information about each one.

Download NetResView. Run the program and after a short period of time it should display a bunch of information about each system. Works under XP Pro and 7 64bit.

Have you ever noticed how great the auto complete function is for Outlook? Just start typing a name and all the contacts that you’ve ever emailed in the past will auto show up. That allows you to select from the list – which is especially helpful when you’ve forgotten part of someone’s name but know you’ve emailed them before.

The file that allows for this to happen is called the NK2 file. To see this file you may want to make sure you can see hidden files (In any Windows window, click Tools then Folder Options. Then under the view tab, click Show hidden files, folders, and drives. If you can’t find the Tools menu, hit the Alt key)

Windows 2000/XP
C:\Documents and Settings\USER_NAME\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Outlook.NK2

Windows Vista/7
C:\Users\USER_NAME\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Outlook\Outlook.NK2

Problem 1:
I have a new computer and want to move this over.
This is the easiest to accomplish. Just make sure that Outlook is closed (fully closed, check the task manager if you have any doubts), and copy the NK2 file from the old system and paste it into the new system.

Problem 2:
My auto completes stopped working.
This has a fairly high success rate, but no guarantees. Basically this happens when your NK2 file becomes corrupt. Now, I think there are some utilities out there that are “supposed” to fix this, but the best bet I found was to just:
Close Outlook fully
Copy Outlook.NK2 to OutlookCopy.NK2
Delete Outlook.NK2
Open Outlook, send an email, close Outlook fully
Delete Outlook.NK2 again (it should have made another because you sent an email)
Rename the OutlookCopy.NK2 file to Outlook.NK2
Open Outlook

Your auto completes should now work!

I honestly haven’t come across any other problems regarding NK2 files. And I’ve only tried them from the same versions (2007 to 2007, and 2003 to 2003), so if you’re trying to move from 2003 to 2010 Outlook and this doesn’t work… sorry?

Tested OK on Windows XP, Vista, 7. Using Office 2003, 2007.

Undeliverable NDR:

Several users were complaining that whenever they’d send a calendar invite to a specific person that they would get an NDR back saying that a user was not found in the organization. Unfortunately the user that does not exist was not in the original calendar invite.

Server is 2003 Enterprise running Exchange 2003 Standard. Clients are using Office 2007 (outlook) SP2 fully updated.

Actual message is as follows:

Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.

Subject: Rehearsal: School Play @ 4:30pm – 6pm
Sent: 1/7/2010 11:19 AM

The following recipient(s) cannot be reached:

Robert LastName on 1/7/2010 11:19 AM
The e-mail account does not exist at the organization this message was sent to. Check the e-mail address, or contact the recipient directly to find out the correct address.

It’s obviously been edited as to not show the real names of people and servers. But you get the general idea.
The problem was with a delegate assigned by a current user pointing to the non-existent user. When a user is deleted in AD they do not automatically get removed from delegation on Outlook. So here’s the fix with a few screen shots:

In Outlook on the offending system (the person who you are sending invites TO when receiving the NDR), go to Tools > Options.
Click on the Delegates Tab
Remove the offending user

It doesn’t happen too often that I come across an error that I haven’t seen before.

Customer is running Exchange 2003 on a native 2003 server infrastructure. Users would log into the webmail area but when they’d click on any emails to read the nasty 507 error would show up. Another issue was that webmail was up-to-date but the local outlook client was not. Local client would say it was connected to Exchange, but would not actively update folders. Forced updates yielded no results.

A quick check of the eventlog showed this:

Source: MSExchangeIS
Category: Performance
Event ID: 9582
Description: The virtual memory necessary to run your Exchange server is fragmented in such a way that normal operation may begin to fail. It is highly recommended that you restart all Exchange services to correct this issue.

Well that’s an easy fix. I shut down the services:
IMAP4
Management
MTA Stacks
POP3
Routing Engine
Information Store
System Attendant

And then started them back up in the reverse order. Everything checked out OK. Now to get them to upgrade to Exchange 07/10…

I had to RDP to a server several times before this actually started to bother me:
Dell has their own image set as the default background during the login prompt. RDP over the internet enough and the slow loading of the background starts to eat away at you.

It’s a simple registry hack to fix it:

Start – Run
regedit
HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop
Find a key named Wallpaper
Change the key’s data to (None) instead of C:\windows\dellcrap\dellcrapimage.bmp
Close out of the registry editor
Wait a few minutes and it should be gone when you try to login.

This worked on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

I wanted to change the login screen for Windows 7 and Vista. I know I had a program on Vista that allowed me to change it without a problem, but I can’t seem to find it after I wiped out the drive :).

So anyway, here’s another free way to change it without going into the registry yourself:
http://it.thelibrarie.com/utilities/W7C%20LogonUI%20Changer.exe

Open it up, click on the middle, select your picture, and away you go. It resizes and everything. Yay.

Or for the jerks out there that want to remotely have fun with coworkers:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background

Check to see if a DWord value named OEMBackground exists and has a value of 1. If not, right click the white-space and create a DWORD Value for this.

Put an UNDER 256KB file in this directory:
%windir%\system32\oobe\info\backgrounds
Name the file backgroundDefault.jpg