B
Bill Evans
I'm crossposting this to three newsgroups because I'm not sure which
newsgroup this topic should be discussed in. This isn't my computer problem
I'm asking about, but rather it's my Dad's. I'm a computer consultant and
lifer college student, and my Dad has been bugging me for the past three
weeks to fix a problem he's having on his computer. So far I have had very
little success.
My Dad has two USB flash memory sticks; one (128 MB) that's about four years
old, and another (1 GB) that's brand new. The new one is a PNY Attaché. I
can't remember what brand the old one is, and the label has worn off of the
plastic case.
Recently the "Safely Remove Hardware" trayicon that lets him shut down any
USB mass storage device so it can be safely removed disappeared. It hasn't
just hidden itself because it thinks it's inactive, because I have "Hide
inactive icons" turned "Off" on this machine. I did try turning it back
"On", opening the "Customize Notifications" dialog box, and changing the
behavior for the "Safely Remove Hardware" trayicon to "Always Show", and
still it doesn't show itself when either of the USB flash memory sticks are
attached to a USB port on this computer.
I have googled the entire internet, including usenet archives, and have seen
several people ask this same identical question. None of the people that I
saw that asked this question ever found a solution to this problem.
Predictably they were told that they'd turned the icon to "Always Hide", or
"Hide When Inactive", and almost always the original poster of the question
would
say that he'd already thought of that and tried changing that. Usually
anyone that's knowledgeable enough about computers and tech support issues
to
get around to posting a question in a newsgroup is going to be savvy enough
to have already tried the obvious solution to a problem without success, but
I digress....
Even though this isn't my computer and I rarely if ever use it, I know for a
fact that the "Safely Remove Hardware" trayicon did operate as intended up
until three weeks ago. This is a Dell 3000 2.8 GHz P-4 with 512 MB of RAM
running Windows XP Home SP2 that was purchased in August of 2005. I set it
up and protected it against malware before turning it over to my Dad and
hooking it up to the home network at it's permanent location on his desk.
When I set it up, the USB flash drive worked exactly as it's supposed to: If
you stuck it into any USB port while the machine was on, you would hear the
Windows sound for "Device Connect", then the trayicon would appear. After
using it, you could then shut it down using the trayicon, the Windows sound
for "Device Disconnect" would chime, and then you could safely remove it.
According to my Dad, about a month ago the "Safely Remove Hardware" trayicon
disappeared, and when my Dad asked me what he should do about it, I told him
not to worry about it and to remove his USB 128 MB flash memory stick
whenever he needed to remove it. After waiting five-ten seconds after
copying files to it for the file transfer to be flushed from any cache, of
course.
He did this for about a week, until he lost some files on the memory stick
and had to recopy them to the stick a second time. After that, he had to
shut the machine down and wait for the machine to power down fully before he
felt confident that he could safely remove the USB flash memory stick. Also
the memory stick started acting flaky in general (according to my Dad), so
we ordered him a new 1 GB USB flash memory stick.
I had hopes that when the new memory stick arrived and I installed it, that
the problem with the missing trayicon would rectify itself. It didn't. It
has the same identical symptoms as the old USB flash memory stick.
ANY SUGGESTIONS? I've already installed the most recent USB 2.0 drivers,
motherboard, chipset, and BIOS updates I could get from the Dell web site.
Also I have other weird things happening with this machine:
1) When I have been experimenting with the memory sticks on my Dad's
computer, and also on my computer, naturally I've been removing the entry in
"Device Manager" for the USB flash memory stick under the disk drive
section, and any other various entries (like "USB Mass Storage Device") that
I could find.
Then I'd reboot, and try reattaching the USB flash memory stick so I could
reinstall the device drivers from scratch. When I would insert the memory
stick into a USB port, the first dialog box that would come up would be "New
Hardware Found", and it would say that it had found new hardware called
"Security Device" that I can't find the driver for anywhere. Neither memory
stick came with any CD or floppy disk with any drivers, and Windows XP
couldn't find a driver for any "Security Device" when I would tell it to
automatically search locally and on "Windows Update" for the driver, and I
tried to manually find the driver in the \I386 folder, or in the
\Windows\Options\Cabs or \Windows\Inf or \Windows\System or
\Windows\System32 or anywhere else.
I also googled the net for an answer to this one with no success, but if you
cancel the search for a driver for "Security Device", a second "New Hardware
Found" dialog box would appear and correctly install the needed generic
Windows driver for USB flash memory sticks and also for USB mass storage
devices and it would work. As I said earlier, this odd behavior happens on
his machine and also on my machine. Other than this, my machine's "Safely
Remove Hardware" trayicon acts normally.
2) A Ctrl-Alt-Del three fingered salute on my Dad's machine does NOT bring
up Task Manager.
The machine has seemed slower than it did three months or even two months
ago, and it was purchased in October of this past year. Naturally the first
thing I think is "What bad thingie is running in the back ground, using MY
precious CPU cycles?". So I tried to bring up Task Manager to see if I
recognized anything bad, or even anything marginal that I would remove if
one of my parents had installed anything unwise like Weatherbug or whatever.
I tried to bring up Task Manager in the normal fashion, by hitting
Ctrl-Alt-Del, with no response.
That really concerns me, but there's no reason for me to think it's another
symptom of the same problem that's caused the "Safely Remove Hardware"
trayicon to disappear. It may indeed be connected to that problem, but
since
I have no reason to think that at this time, I'm going to table that problem
for later since that machine is relatively protected against malware, at
least it's better protected than 99.9% of the other computers I've run
across doing computer consulting. It's "Windows Updates" are 100% up to
date; it's using ZoneAlarm; Symantec Anti-Virus with it's definitions
up-to-date; Javacool Spywareblaster with all protections enabled and it's
definitions up-to-date; the MS Anti-Spyware beta with a daily disk scan, all
protections enabled and it's definitions up-to-date; Spybot with a daily
disk scan, all protections (including the HOSTS file locked down and IE's
home page locked down) enabled and it's definitions up-to-date; and manual
weekly Ad-Aware disk scans with it's definitions up-to-date.
2) Every time I reboot, the machine keeps opening up a copy of Windows
Explorer, viewing the contents of a particular folder on the hard drive.
The machine does have "Restore previous folder windows at logon" turned on,
but the folder gets closed every time the machine boots, and still after a
reboot, it reappears. I turned off "Restore previous folder windows at
logon", and still after a reboot, it reappears. Then I turned "Restore
previous folder windows at logon" back on, and still after a reboot, it
reappears, even after having been closed when the machine was shut down.
3) Naturally the first thing I wanted to check to see what might be opening
this folder was the "Startup" folder, and there was nothing unusual there.
Next I wanted to look in the registry for any keys in
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run that I
didn't recognize.
I tried typing "Regedit" in the "Run" dialog box, and Windows told me that
it couldn't find or access the resource. So I checked the PATH environment
variable, and it was assigned to "PATH=C:\WINDOWS\system32;C:\WINDOWS" as it
should be.
Then I tried browsing to the C:\WINDOWS\ folder, double-clicked on
regedit.exe, and the browse dialog box correctly returned
"C:\WINDOWS\regedit.exe" to the run dialog box. I thought "Surely it'll be
able to find it now....", but when I clicked on the OK button in the run
dialog box, NOTHING HAPPENED!
Ditto opening a command prompt and typing "regedit".
So how do I open a copy of Regedit to try to diagnose and fix these other
problems?
Do I need to make a new user ID on that machine and see if it exhibits these
same weird symptoms?
--
bill evans
WHEvansIII_no@spam_Charter.net
Hartselle, AL
"Superman where are you now,
When everything's gone wrong somehow..."
newsgroup this topic should be discussed in. This isn't my computer problem
I'm asking about, but rather it's my Dad's. I'm a computer consultant and
lifer college student, and my Dad has been bugging me for the past three
weeks to fix a problem he's having on his computer. So far I have had very
little success.
My Dad has two USB flash memory sticks; one (128 MB) that's about four years
old, and another (1 GB) that's brand new. The new one is a PNY Attaché. I
can't remember what brand the old one is, and the label has worn off of the
plastic case.
Recently the "Safely Remove Hardware" trayicon that lets him shut down any
USB mass storage device so it can be safely removed disappeared. It hasn't
just hidden itself because it thinks it's inactive, because I have "Hide
inactive icons" turned "Off" on this machine. I did try turning it back
"On", opening the "Customize Notifications" dialog box, and changing the
behavior for the "Safely Remove Hardware" trayicon to "Always Show", and
still it doesn't show itself when either of the USB flash memory sticks are
attached to a USB port on this computer.
I have googled the entire internet, including usenet archives, and have seen
several people ask this same identical question. None of the people that I
saw that asked this question ever found a solution to this problem.
Predictably they were told that they'd turned the icon to "Always Hide", or
"Hide When Inactive", and almost always the original poster of the question
would
say that he'd already thought of that and tried changing that. Usually
anyone that's knowledgeable enough about computers and tech support issues
to
get around to posting a question in a newsgroup is going to be savvy enough
to have already tried the obvious solution to a problem without success, but
I digress....
Even though this isn't my computer and I rarely if ever use it, I know for a
fact that the "Safely Remove Hardware" trayicon did operate as intended up
until three weeks ago. This is a Dell 3000 2.8 GHz P-4 with 512 MB of RAM
running Windows XP Home SP2 that was purchased in August of 2005. I set it
up and protected it against malware before turning it over to my Dad and
hooking it up to the home network at it's permanent location on his desk.
When I set it up, the USB flash drive worked exactly as it's supposed to: If
you stuck it into any USB port while the machine was on, you would hear the
Windows sound for "Device Connect", then the trayicon would appear. After
using it, you could then shut it down using the trayicon, the Windows sound
for "Device Disconnect" would chime, and then you could safely remove it.
According to my Dad, about a month ago the "Safely Remove Hardware" trayicon
disappeared, and when my Dad asked me what he should do about it, I told him
not to worry about it and to remove his USB 128 MB flash memory stick
whenever he needed to remove it. After waiting five-ten seconds after
copying files to it for the file transfer to be flushed from any cache, of
course.
He did this for about a week, until he lost some files on the memory stick
and had to recopy them to the stick a second time. After that, he had to
shut the machine down and wait for the machine to power down fully before he
felt confident that he could safely remove the USB flash memory stick. Also
the memory stick started acting flaky in general (according to my Dad), so
we ordered him a new 1 GB USB flash memory stick.
I had hopes that when the new memory stick arrived and I installed it, that
the problem with the missing trayicon would rectify itself. It didn't. It
has the same identical symptoms as the old USB flash memory stick.
ANY SUGGESTIONS? I've already installed the most recent USB 2.0 drivers,
motherboard, chipset, and BIOS updates I could get from the Dell web site.
Also I have other weird things happening with this machine:
1) When I have been experimenting with the memory sticks on my Dad's
computer, and also on my computer, naturally I've been removing the entry in
"Device Manager" for the USB flash memory stick under the disk drive
section, and any other various entries (like "USB Mass Storage Device") that
I could find.
Then I'd reboot, and try reattaching the USB flash memory stick so I could
reinstall the device drivers from scratch. When I would insert the memory
stick into a USB port, the first dialog box that would come up would be "New
Hardware Found", and it would say that it had found new hardware called
"Security Device" that I can't find the driver for anywhere. Neither memory
stick came with any CD or floppy disk with any drivers, and Windows XP
couldn't find a driver for any "Security Device" when I would tell it to
automatically search locally and on "Windows Update" for the driver, and I
tried to manually find the driver in the \I386 folder, or in the
\Windows\Options\Cabs or \Windows\Inf or \Windows\System or
\Windows\System32 or anywhere else.
I also googled the net for an answer to this one with no success, but if you
cancel the search for a driver for "Security Device", a second "New Hardware
Found" dialog box would appear and correctly install the needed generic
Windows driver for USB flash memory sticks and also for USB mass storage
devices and it would work. As I said earlier, this odd behavior happens on
his machine and also on my machine. Other than this, my machine's "Safely
Remove Hardware" trayicon acts normally.
2) A Ctrl-Alt-Del three fingered salute on my Dad's machine does NOT bring
up Task Manager.
The machine has seemed slower than it did three months or even two months
ago, and it was purchased in October of this past year. Naturally the first
thing I think is "What bad thingie is running in the back ground, using MY
precious CPU cycles?". So I tried to bring up Task Manager to see if I
recognized anything bad, or even anything marginal that I would remove if
one of my parents had installed anything unwise like Weatherbug or whatever.
I tried to bring up Task Manager in the normal fashion, by hitting
Ctrl-Alt-Del, with no response.
That really concerns me, but there's no reason for me to think it's another
symptom of the same problem that's caused the "Safely Remove Hardware"
trayicon to disappear. It may indeed be connected to that problem, but
since
I have no reason to think that at this time, I'm going to table that problem
for later since that machine is relatively protected against malware, at
least it's better protected than 99.9% of the other computers I've run
across doing computer consulting. It's "Windows Updates" are 100% up to
date; it's using ZoneAlarm; Symantec Anti-Virus with it's definitions
up-to-date; Javacool Spywareblaster with all protections enabled and it's
definitions up-to-date; the MS Anti-Spyware beta with a daily disk scan, all
protections enabled and it's definitions up-to-date; Spybot with a daily
disk scan, all protections (including the HOSTS file locked down and IE's
home page locked down) enabled and it's definitions up-to-date; and manual
weekly Ad-Aware disk scans with it's definitions up-to-date.
2) Every time I reboot, the machine keeps opening up a copy of Windows
Explorer, viewing the contents of a particular folder on the hard drive.
The machine does have "Restore previous folder windows at logon" turned on,
but the folder gets closed every time the machine boots, and still after a
reboot, it reappears. I turned off "Restore previous folder windows at
logon", and still after a reboot, it reappears. Then I turned "Restore
previous folder windows at logon" back on, and still after a reboot, it
reappears, even after having been closed when the machine was shut down.
3) Naturally the first thing I wanted to check to see what might be opening
this folder was the "Startup" folder, and there was nothing unusual there.
Next I wanted to look in the registry for any keys in
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run that I
didn't recognize.
I tried typing "Regedit" in the "Run" dialog box, and Windows told me that
it couldn't find or access the resource. So I checked the PATH environment
variable, and it was assigned to "PATH=C:\WINDOWS\system32;C:\WINDOWS" as it
should be.
Then I tried browsing to the C:\WINDOWS\ folder, double-clicked on
regedit.exe, and the browse dialog box correctly returned
"C:\WINDOWS\regedit.exe" to the run dialog box. I thought "Surely it'll be
able to find it now....", but when I clicked on the OK button in the run
dialog box, NOTHING HAPPENED!
Ditto opening a command prompt and typing "regedit".
So how do I open a copy of Regedit to try to diagnose and fix these other
problems?
Do I need to make a new user ID on that machine and see if it exhibits these
same weird symptoms?
--
bill evans
WHEvansIII_no@spam_Charter.net
Hartselle, AL
"Superman where are you now,
When everything's gone wrong somehow..."