XM(hel)L

For the past few days on my Windows box I've been getting an Error in my Event Log from MsiInstaller stating the following:

"Product: Microsoft XML Parser and SDK -- The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2103. The arguments are: 26, , "

After a bit of research online it turns out that this means that Automatic Update failed to install a critical security update for the Microsoft XML Parser, which also explains why the error coincides with my previously set Automatic Update time. Thanks to Chris Miller it has been determined that this problem can be solved by installing the newest Microsoft XML Parser and SDK (msxml.msi) from the following site: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=3144b72b-b4f2-46da-b4b6-c5d7485f2b42&languageid=f49e8428-7071-4979-8a67-3cffcb0c2524&displaylang=en#filelist Again, please feel free to try this fix, it worked for me.

An operation...that is not a socket

Well, I started my Windows 2000 computer today and while trying to renew my IP address from the DHCP server received the following message: "An operation was attempted on something that is not a socket" Luckily after a bit of searching I found the following article on support.microsoft.com: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;817571 which seems to have allieviated this particular problem. Unfortunately it also left me with a problem where where I was completely locked out of my remote printers from this particular machine. Apparently both of these problems are related to McAfee firewall and its playing with the Windows networking software. In the end the only way to recover what McAfee had destroyed with the printers was to update from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, although any update (even to the same OS) or use of the system recovery tool (located on the Windows installation disc) should fix the problem.

Even Retail Goes Bad

A couple of days ago I upgraded my old server from its measly PIII 1.0GHz w/ Flex-ATX mobo to a brand spanking new AMD Athlon 64 1.8GHz w/ MSI K8T-Neo mobo. Since my new MSI motherboard didn't have integrated video I threw my Opteron box's video card into the new server and bought a nice new cheap (but better than the card I just removed) PCI 128MB ATI card for my Opteron box. Unfortunately the card appears to be DOA and crashes the computer literally two seconds after every boot. Hopefully I'll be exchanging this card at CompUSA tomorrow and my Opteron box will be up and running soon.

Discoverable Oddity

Today I tried to remove an old Add/Remove Programs entry for OpenOffice 1.1.2 and was confused as to why I couldn't find its key in: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall After a bit of searching on the web I found that there's a "bug" in OOo 1.1.2 that puts its Add/Remove Programs key in: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall Just wanted to let you guys know in case you ran into this same oddity and want to get that useless entry out of you Add/Remove Programs menu.

In case anyone is interested in the standard official removal of false entries from the Add/Remove Programs list you can find Microsoft Article ID: 314481 here: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=314481