Windows 7 Hanging at Logon? Try Hotfix 2578159

So tonight I fire up my desktop PC just like usual, key in my password just like usual and as a result am greeted by the “Welcome” message and animated spinner, just like usual. Except unlike usual, the “Welcome” message sits there perpetually spinning for fifteen minutes with no further response.

I hit the reset button and tried it again two or three more times, in case it was a fluke. Still couldn’t logon. I even used System Restore to go back to the previous restore point, which was yesterday evening, when I knew the machine was running normally. Nope…still couldn’t logon.

Naturally, I’d arranged to work from home tomorrow, and now it was looking like I wasn’t going to have a PC to actually work on. So I did what any reasonable man would do in the year 2012: I got on my smartphone and started looking for clues. While that was underway, I tried booting to Windows 7′s Safe Mode. Interestingly, that worked. From there, I checked the System event log and found a whole lot of messages about services timing out or not starting in a timely fashion, like this:

A timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the Print Spooler service to connect.

This was really just symptomatic of the problem, not indicative of its cause.

Fortunately, after relatively little searching, I found Microsoft Knowledge Base article 2578159. It describes a hotfix meant to resolve issues with the logon process, in which a “race condition” between the Windows Event Log service and the Event Tracing for Windows functions causes a deadlock situation. Now, quite honestly I have no idea what that means or why it would suddenly decide to happen after a year of trouble-free OS operation. But it sure described my problem to a T, so I decided to give it a try.

Here’s where the sheer number of hoops that I needed to jump through just to install a hotfix became comical. First off, Microsoft wouldn’t let me just download the hotfix. They made me give them my email address so they could email me a link to it. OK, fine. So after I’d downloaded the hotfix (still running in Safe Mode, remember) I tried to install it, but the installer service reported that I could not do so from Safe Mode. Great, so how am I supposed to install it if I can’t login normally?

Further searching of the web revealed that I could use msconfig.exe to selectively disable all non-Microsoft startup items, which would allow me to login normally (read: not in Safe Mode). After firing up msconfig, at first I tried to be greedy and just choose the “Diagnostic startup” option. Unfortunately, that didn’t work, because that prevents the Windows Installer service from loading, thus the hotfix still could not be installed. Grudgingly, I went back to msconfig, picked “Selective startup”, and then literally unchecked all of the Services and Startup items that did not say “Microsoft Corp.” listed as their manufacturer. Finally, after doing that and rebooting, I was able to not only logon normally, but also install hotfix 2578159.

Since installing the hotfix, I have had no further issues with logging on. It does indeed seem to have solved my problem.

Just thought I would put that out there, with an added smattering of real-world experience, in case anyone else runs into this.

My (Xbox) Kingdom for a Power Supply

(Credit goes to Pooch for the title of this post.)

After deliberating and collecting funds for some weeks, I finally ordered a new Xbox 360 on my birthday. I’d like to state upfront that this wouldn’t have been possible without the generous gift(card)s I received from my family and friends, so huge thanks and shout-outs go out to all of you! After deliberating at some length about exactly which Xbox to buy, I settled on the Gears of War Limited Edition bundle — and thanks to Amazon Prime, I had it in my hands less than 18 hours later.

I documented the process of setting it up, intending to write a follow-up (or a sequel?) to the entry I posted in 2010 when I bought my last Xbox. The point was to compare the old “Fat” Xbox to the new “Slim” one, and highlight the software differences that make playing games on more than one Xbox console a lot easier than it used to be. However, before I can get to that point, I have to deal with a small…problem.

You’ve probably heard Microsoft tout the redesigned Xbox 360 Slim as being “whisper quiet”. If not, you’ve almost certainly heard everyone under the sun blasting the older Xboxes for being loud as hell. So I was a little surprised when I powered up my new Slim console and discovered that it sounds not unlike my Jasper-based Final Fantasy XIII Super Elite. If anything, the fan noise on the new Xbox is more annoying! Although it’s a little bit quieter, the frequency of the motor whine is far more annoying to my ears. It was honestly kind of a let-down, but I figured I just had sensitive ears. Everything else seemed to be working OK, so I registered the console’s warranty and transferred my content licenses to it. (This process has changed too, and definitely for the better. I’ll have news on that in my upcoming review.)

A few days later, I was in the game room at around 2:00 in the morning trying to figure out why our Internet connection had been sucking lately. This had me back behind the console table where my new Xbox sits, dorking around with the router that I keep there to see if it was the source of our connectivity woes. (Hint: it was.) I accidentally started up the Xbox while I was doing this, thanks to its new touch-capacitive power button, and much to my surprise I realized that the fan noise I’d been getting used to wasn’t coming from the Xbox console. What the shit? So what is that noise, then? I started hunting around and received quite a shock when I discovered the source of the noise was the Xbox’s power supply brick!

Now I’ve owned a fair few Xbox 360s, several of which have had their problems. None of them has ever had a screwy power supply brick. In fact, I still have every Xbox power supply brick I’ve ever owned because they all did their jobs: they effectively and SILENTLY supplied power to each and every console until that console’s dying day. Why is this brand new Xbox 360, bastion of whisper quiet, equipped with a power supply that’s whining and droning like an old 286? Even more baffling is the fact that the new Slim consoles come with an equally slim-ified power supply, which uses less power than any of the models that came before it. Why does this thing have an audible fan when the huge honking 203W power supply that came with my 2005 Xbox never made a peep?

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The Xbox Acquisition Deliberation

In the old days, I would replace my computer every couple of years. Since I don’t game on the PC much anymore, I’m still finding myself perfectly happy (well, mostly) with the computer I built in October of 2006. The object of my upgrade fever, meanwhile, has turned to mobile phones and game consoles, and it is these items that I now find myself replacing on a two-year cycle.

Having just upgraded to the iPhone 4S this past fall, I’m now approaching the two-year anniversary of my last Xbox 360 purchase, an ordeal necessitated by the death of my previous console from a case of scarlet ring disease. Back in March of 2010, newly Xboxless, I picked up a Final Fantasy XIII Super Elite limited edition unit. It’s still going strong today, no doubt thanks to manufacturing improvements made over time (and the fact that I install all my games to the hard disk now, to minimize heat produced by the spinning optical drive). But I recently started thinking that having a second Xbox in the house might be handy.

Now that we’ve got bouncing baby Connor to keep us busy around the house, I find it more difficult on the weekends to shut myself away in the game room upstairs for Xbox sessions. Although I still like the theater-like ambience of the game room during the nighttime hours after Connor goes to bed, I’d like to stay downstairs during the day and, when I’m not busy keeping Connor entertained, catch a game session or two without having to remove myself from view. (After all, when you have a three-month old baby, you never know when you’re going to be needed!)

I’d be lying, however, if I didn’t simply feel like getting a shiny new Xbox to brighten my gaming future. Since I bought my last console, the Xbox 360 has been completely redesigned, resulting in a slick new look, near-silent operation, touch-operated controls, greater reliability and the addition of integrated Wi-Fi and powered Kinect ports. Since rumors have it that the next-generation Xbox console should be out in just shy of two years’ time — playing right into my next upgrade cycle — this seems like the perfect time to pick up one last console from this generation and enjoy it for the years to come. Maybe even hand it down to my son for his own enjoyment when he’s ready! (Who am I kidding; he’ll know it’s an old piece of crap by then. “Really, Dad?” he’ll say as he rolls his eyes.)

However, with the Xbox landscape a lot more cluttered and complicated than it was two years ago, I decided to hash out my thoughts in this handy Oddball Update (Relevance Not Included™) and try to come to some kind of decision about how to proceed. If you’re interested in taking the journey with me, meet me past the break and we’ll Jump In. (Har har. That’s the Xbox slogan.)

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Social Media is Not an Equalizer

This morning, a colleage sent me a link to an article on Slashdot about some comments made by former Google executive Stafford Masie, who believes that “traditional [web] search is dying” because users are becoming more inclined to ask their social networks for information instead of searching static web pages. Go read the article if you’d like to delve more into Mr. Masie’s reasoning.

I see this same proclamation more and more often these days. Some people (almost all of them connected with Google in some way, it seems) are constantly falling all over themselves trying to assure us that one day soon all of our answers will come from the great social cloud: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, you name it. When we want answers, we’re going to start increasingly asking our friends instead of asking web pages in Google’s search indexes. I even saw one unconscionably arrogant individual pen an article asserting that we’re all going to be using Google+ “whether we want to or not.”

Frankly, this is just as much bullshit now as it was yesterday, last month, or last year when I penned my previous rant about this assertion. And it’ll still be bullshit tomorrow for all but a select minority of the Internet population. How many of you have a social network of thousands of people, all of them skilled individuals loaded with detailed knowledge about dozens of arcane fields? Twenty years ago, would you have thrown away your set of encyclopedias and asked only your friends at the coffee shop for information while writing a report or doing research? Even if you had very knowledgeable and influential friends, checking unbiased sources is always good practice. And what if you had only a few friends, or didn’t know anyone with knowledge on the subject at hand?

That’s why I am completely against the idea of social networks as a source of reference information, because let’s face it: that’s how most of the world uses Google, as a search engine for reference information. It might not be “reference” in the traditional sense (sci, tech, history) — hell, you might just be looking for a guide to completing a quest in some video game, or a list of episode synopses from an old TV show. This is still reference information. Google asserts that this kind of search is becoming archaic, and that we should want to search the social cloud because of its “constant freshness”. In some areas, seeding a search with recent developments via social media might be useful, but most of the time you want your reference information unclouded by potentially skewed or biased opinion (which is essentially what all social media is).

Furthermore — and this is the biggest factor for me — I see web search as an equalizer. I wrote about this once before, but search engines like Google are incredibly powerful not just technologically, but socially and politically as well, because they put the power of information in the hands of everyone with equal measure. You don’t have to have a circle of six hundred friends from Sandia National Laboratories, or personally know people who actually experienced a historical event you want to learn about. Those people have created information and placed it on the web, and Google is the directory through which you are connected with that information. You don’t have to know the author of said information. You don’t have to have expensive tastes or exclusive contacts. You only need a computer and an Internet connection.

Former Google executive Stafford Masie foresees a world in which this great equalizer of information is downplayed, and replaced with a hastily-erected resurrection of the social caste system that we deal with in real life. Social-driven search pressures us all to build wide and vast social networks online, almost competitively, in order to have access to information. We’re moving away from the idea that curiosity and intellect should catalyze information acquisition, and back to the idea that the key to acquiring knowledge is social extroversion.

Call me bitter, but as an introvert who never had much taste for socializing in real life, and who has relished the rise of the great equalizer of web search, the idea of a socially powered search network is an enormous, eye-rolling step backwards.

Lest you think me a Luddite, social media is far from devoid of merit. Your social network will undoubtedly be a better place than Google for information on temporal media (TV shows, movies, current events) precisely because of that constant freshness that I mentioned earlier. It’s a great place for restaurant recommendations, references for local service professionals and case studies. And of course, it’s the best way I know of to keep up with family and friends who live in all corners of the world; that is a technological marvel in and of itself.

But a social network is not, nor will it ever be in my estimation, a replacement for in-depth, unbiased and accurate reference information on a vast array of subjects, many of which professionals like myself deal with in our careers on a daily basis.

Lastly, we would do well to remember that as a business whose revenue stream is based on advertising, Google is naturally inclined to talk up social networking because it benefits them financially. Anyone who believes that Google is more than superficially concerned about anything other than how much money they can make from social media is living in a utopian dream world.

I’ll leave you with another user’s comment from the Slashdot article mentioned above, which I found particularly on-target.

There are social network ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. Some people have 500,000 twitter followers, and can ask just about any question and get a slew of responses, some of them excellent. Some people have 15 with nary a high school graduate in the list; getting insightful and timely answers from that list is not nearly as likely. People with hundreds or thousands of followers think that social media is going to change the world; they literally do not realize that not everyone has the same type of network that they do. That, in fact, they are blessed with a surplus of social power in the same way that some people have wealth.

Search engines don’t care how many friends you have. They have answers. Search is an equalizer; social networks are not.

Successes Both Mechanical and Technological

The weekend isn’t even halfway over, and already I’ve achieved two significant project successes — or at least, I hope I have. (One of them has yet to be proven out). Since at least one of these has been something I’ve tried to achieve for a long time without any success, I thought I’d post how I got it done in case it helps others.

The Technological

This is the one that I think others might be interested in. Here at home, we have a TiVo HD DVR that we use to record HD programming that we pick up from a Channel Master 4228HD over-the-air TV antenna. While this works a treat, the problem is that I don’t have a second TiVo HD in the game room upstairs and thus can’t watch my favorite shows like Fringe on my new plasma TV up there. However, I do have a perfectly competent PS3 Media Server running on my computer, and the plasma TV has a built-in DLNA client that can stream programs from my server with ease. Surely there’s a solution here somewhere.

TiVo records shows to MPEG-2 files that are encrypted using your TiVo Media Access Key (MAK). It’s a simple matter to decrypt these things, but that’s as far as I could ever get. Simply dropping the decrypted .mpg file into my PS3 Media Server folder doesn’t work; client players can never reliably play back the file. Either I’ll get picture with no audio, or sometimes nothing at all. Sometimes the video would play back on a computer, but I’d often have problems with the audio and video getting out of sync, especially if I fast-forward or rewind. I’ve tried free tool after free tool to convert these stupid things and I’d always get these same problems. I did manage to figure out that something about TiVo’s .mpg files isn’t exactly “industry standard”, in the sense that there is some incorrect, missing or misplaced information in them that causes video tools to choke or work improperly.

Well, recently I discovered a handy-dandly little Java program called kmttg. This program purports to be an all-in-one solution for copying, decoding, re-encoding and transferring TiVo files. Sounds great, I thought. kmttg is one of those great apps that amalgamizes several other tools and utilities to reach an end goal in an automated fashion, and best of all, it downloads and installs almost all of those tools for you without any manual intervention. So I set it up and unleashed it upon the first episode of Fringe’s fourth season, told it to convert to a nice .mp4 file with AAC audio, and hoped that this time I would get lucky.

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The PC is Dying? Hardly

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of proclamations that the personal computer as we know it is rapidly being replaced by smartphones and tablets, with today’s CNN Money article about the slow death of the PC being just the latest example. Personally, as someone who works in the IT field and uses a PC to create tangible content, I feel that there is a salient point often left out of analyses such as this: if the PC is on its way out, then on what device will producers create all of the content that we will consume with our new phones and tablets?

Tablets are great for consumption of media: checking email, browsing the web, updating your Facebook status, reading magazines or books. Some of these things were the sole reasons why many households had a “family computer” in the first place. For those households, tablets are a great option because there’s a lot less cruft, a lot more simplicity and lower energy use, not to mention no more need to dedicate an entire piece of furniture to a desktop computer. But for somebody who is creating intricately detailed websites or graphic art, or coding and testing an application in an integrated development environment, how can a small, simple tablet possibly hold up?

It can’t, in my world. While it’s possible to create compelling art on a tablet using a stylus or even your own finger — similar to what a Wacom tablet on a PC would do, although much less precise in my experience — this allows for only fairly broad strokes. I have no idea how it would ever be possible to use a relatively fat, stubby, imprecise thing like a finger to design things like pixel-precise layouts and finely detailed icons. I simply need to have the precision of a pointing device.

Multi-monitor setups are another thing that’s not happening (yet) with tablets, and I’m not in any hurry to give up my three-screen array with Photoshop’s canvas on one screen and its tool palettes on another so that I can cram it all onto a 10-inch tablet. No thanks. Programmers surely fall into the same group, and I know many who live and die by multi-monitor arrays consisting of as many as four, five or even six screens. Even with one screen, you’d need significant enough real estate for all of the tools, browsers and panels that typically go along with IDE-based development.

I found the CNN Money article somewhat telling because it indicates PC sales are actually up significantly in markets like China and India, while they are down in North America. Factoring into this, I’m sure, is the fact that China and India’s economies are growing very rapidly, affording more and more households the ability (and desire) to purchase a PC. Whereas here in the West, PCs have surely already reached a sort of saturation, and tablets are looking much more appealing to families who just want a device that can check email and surf the web.

At the same time, though, I wonder if part of this is because India and China are doing a huge amount of actual producing of content now, not just manufacturing of tangible goods but also development of software and systems.

Although there’s no doubt that the PC’s market share stands to continue declining slowly as more consumer-friendly “consumption devices” become both available and more affordable, I don’t see the PC truly “dying” anytime soon. It’s simply too important a tool for too many professionals, a tool for which there is not yet anything close to an apt replacement.

A Guide to iPhone Preordering: Take an Anxiolytic First

So last night I preordered my first iPhone. Yes, despite owning two previous models — the 3GS and the original flavor — each time I’ve just walked into an Apple store and bought it. Part of the reason for this is the fact that preorders weren’t even taken on iPhones until the iPhone 4 was released in 2010. Even so, there’s something really fulfilling about just buying something you’ve saved up for from a brick-and-mortar store, holding it in your hands and getting to play with it as soon as you lay out the cash. (Or gift card, as was the case in 2008 when Apple refused to take my actual Benjamins.)

Anyway, this year I wanted the new iPhone on release day, and I didn’t want to be one of those noinks sleeping in a tent outside the local mega-mall. So when the news got around the preorders would start being taken at 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time on Friday the 7th, I resolved to stay up and be one of the first to get my order in. The iPhone 4 sold out pretty quick last year, so if you want to be a part of the first batch, you need to act within the first few hours.

Since midnight Pacific is 2 a.m. Central, and I was feeling pretty sleepy by 7 o’clock last evening, I figured I’d just go to bed and catch some winks before the actual release time. I set my 3GS alarm to wake me up with an obnoxious duck sound and read Lovecraft on the phone’s tiny screen until I could stand it no more.

When the incessant quacking first launched me out of my slumber at 2 a.m., I immediately checked the Apple Store iOS app. Last year it was reported that this was a great way to avoid the server crashes and the hassles that traditional web store visitors endured; plus, it would allow me to order the phone from the comfort of my own bed. But the “We’ll be back soon” post-it note graphic was still being displayed on the Apple store, meaning preorders weren’t open yet. I hit the snooze on the alarm.

I think I woke up, checked, and snoozed again for the next hour before I finally got something other than the “We’ll be back soon” message, but by then, it was 3:15 a.m. Central and the store was erroring out. A crush of people were on it already, it seemed. All right, let’s saddle up and finish this like a man. I shuffled off to the study and fired up the computer, headed over to the Apple store in my browser and tried to order up an iPhone 4S.

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The iPhone Bandwagon, Going On Year Four

It was March of 2008 when I first became a member of the card-carrying, fruit-badged iPhone intelligentsia. Prior to that moment, I was still clinging to my Motorola Razr V9M, a phone that looked like it had been carved from a solid wedge of obsidian, refusing to get on the goofy “candy bar” bandwagon. “Phones that look like candy bars…how dumb! What a waste of space! Who would carry one of those bulky, unwieldy things?”

Then the iPhone arrived, and I was smitten. Technically yes, it was a candy bar form factor, but it was also completely awesome and looked like some kind of space-age device that you’d see Geordi La Forge walking around with in engineering. The $600 price tag was a bit of a problem, though, so I grudgingly tried to ignore it while everybody and their uncle bought one. Luckily, though, I didn’t have long to brood: a fortuitously-timed web design project in February netted me the exact amount of cash needed for the just-introduced 16 GB iPhone, I promptly scooped one up, and the rest is history.

I’ve been an iPhone user ever since, even as the mobile market has exploded around me with competing devices running everything from Android to Windows Phone 7. There’s more of a “spec race” now in cell phones than in computers — when I read all the hoopla on a daily basis about the next hot phone that’s about to drop, it reminds me of 1995 when I salivated over upcoming Intel chipsets and new-generation Pentium processors, wondering which configuration would give me the highest number of frames per second in games like Duke 3D and Quake. Back then I started getting antsy to upgrade my computer every couple of years — exactly as often as I upgrade my phone today. By contrast, my desktop computer turns five years old this month and I’m not feeling especially compelled to replace it. How times change.

I happen to like the “ecosystem” that Apple has created with iOS, iTunes, iCloud and iWhateverElse. This, too, is almost comical to me because I spent the greater part of the 1990s lambasting Apple precisely because of their limited, walled-garden, “we-know-best” approach. But unlike traditional computers, where I demand the freedom to tinker, configure and arrange things exactly as I want them, I just want my phone to work. I want it to do a metric ton of stuff, but I don’t want to worry about any problems along the way. Everything that it does should be part of its overall design, and should function reliably and without question.

While this describes the iPhone perfectly and always has, the mobile landscape is significantly different now as compared to 2008. There are dozens of alternatives to the iPhone, touting 4.6″ 720p screens, dual-core processors, LTE, expandable storage, near-field communication capability, HDMI out and God knows what else. The fifteen-year-old in me who obsessed so completely over his new 200 MHz Pentium Pro desktop in the 1990s would have absolutely lapped it up, and I should have been mightily tempted to jump ship this week when Apple announced the iPhone 4S, which is — on the outside — little more than an iterative update to its previous model. A fairly risky and complacent strategy in the face of such fervent competition, to say the least.

And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted myself, however briefly.

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Internet Explorer 9, Helvetica Type 1, and You

Back when Microsoft officially released the RTM of Internet Explorer 9, I decided to give it a try. After all, as a web designer, I have to stay on top of these things. But I also hated how slow IE8 was, and although there are very few things I still use IE for, I had heard IE9 was a pretty substantial upgrade.

Of course, I immediately regretted installing IE9. Because as soon as I did, I was no longer able to visit a whole slew of websites — they’d just render as a blank white page, render only partially, or lock up the browser altogether. One of those sites was Twitter.com, one of the very few things I still use IE for (because I have two accounts, one of which is for work, and I use IE to post on that one). Another site that wouldn’t render was this blog! Completely embarrassing.

My usual troubleshooting steps failed to help. I uninstalled and reinstalled IE9 several times. I tried installing the Windows Update package and the full distro for IT groups. I tried turning off GPU-accelerated rendering. I tried disabling every IE add-on. Nothing helped. The only valuable piece of evidence I was able to collect was that if I executed IE9 as administrator, the problems would (usually) stop. But that was not a solution I would accept.

So I tried other computers. My laptop and my workstation at the office both exhibited the exact same problem, but the Boot Camp install of Windows 7 on my wife’s Macbook behaved just fine. (Ironic, that IE9 would work better on a Mac than on a PC.) This led me to believe that there was some kind of conflict with some piece of software that I had installed on all three of my machines, but that was as much data as I had the time (and patience) to collect.

As a last-ditch effort, I scoured the Internet, but found nothing. Then I gave up.

Until last week, when I decided to repeat that search in the hopes that a solution had been found in the intervening time. I don’t even recall what made me do it. This time, I found the answer. And it’s incredibly, impossibly arcane.

I was right, in a way, that something I had installed on all of my machines was causing the problem with IE9 and certain websites. But it wasn’t an application or a driver, as I had assumed. It was a font.

A freaking Type 1 font.

For years, being somewhat of a text design wonk, I’ve been carrying around this huge collection of fonts that I use in my daily work. Among them was a copy of Helvetica, that old mainstay, in Type 1 format. And apparently, Internet Explorer 9 hates Helvetica Type 1. If you have this font installed, and try to use IE9 to browse to a site whose CSS style sheet specifies “Helvetica” as the first family name in a font directive, rendering of the site will fail.

Yep — my theme here at Oddball Update calls for Helvetica first and foremost.

I deleted Helvetica from my Font folder — a procedure which, inexplicably, required me to boot Windows 7 in Safe Mode. Once that was done, my IE9 rendering problems were gone.

Furthermore, I installed a replacement copy of Helvetica in the OpenType (.otf) format, and IE9 is still humming along. So the problem is not Helvetica itself, but the Type 1 font format.

I didn’t test this, but it’s possible that any Type 1 font which IE9 tries to use may cause the same renderer failure. It’s just that most other fonts used on the web are not the kinds of fonts that you’d have a Type 1 copy of installed on your Windows machine. I mean, Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana, Tahoma, Courier New, blah blah…I believe they’re all preinstalled with Windows and are thus usually TrueType or OpenType formatted.

So anyway, I post this here today in the hopes that it will help somebody else out. I found a whole lot of very pissed-off people complaining in various web forums about this problem, and none of them had even the first clue that it was font-related either, until somebody along the line finally posted the solution. God knows how they figured it out. It must have been someone with more time than I.