Alexander’s Blog

At least one Net scammer has co-opted the Web security-assurance company’s seal of approval to offer a false impression of safety. Everyone knows not to believe everything they read on the Web. But things get sticky when a company whose main businesses is assuring the security of online transactions gives you assurances that don’t hold up.

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If you try to add or remove a program that uses Windows Installer Microsoft Software Installation (MSI) package file (.msi), you may have seen the following error.

I ran into this when I was trying to remove Microsoft AntiSpyware Beta 1 software from Add or Remove Programs in Windows XP. You may experience this error with Microsoft Office or any other software that uses .msi to install a program. The reason for the error is typically corrupted or missing Windows Installer files on your computer. There are a couple of solutions to fix the problem. You can either try to re-register (Plan A) or re-install (Plan B) the Windows Installer.

Plan A
To re-register Windows Installer, first locate the Msiexec.exe file on your computer (typically in C:\Windows\System32) and then verify in the registry that the location is pointing to the correct path. Run regedit.exe and go to this location: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSIServer. Double-click on the ImagePath entry in the right-hand pane and make sure it matches with the actual path for Msiexec.exe, if not correct the path. Typically the enry would look like this: C:\Windows\System32\Msiexec.exe /V. Reboot your computer into Safe Mode and at the command prompt run msiexec /regserver to re-register the Windows Installer and then reboot your computer in normal mode.

Plan B
If Plan A doesn’t fix the problem then try re-installing the Windows Installer. Reboot in Safe Mode, rename the following three files and then reboot your computer.

msi.dll
msiexec.exe
msihnd.dll

Windows XP already includes Windows Installer version 2.0 but you can download Windows Installer version 3.1 for Windows XP here. For other operating systems, such as NT, Windows 2000, or Windows 9x, go to the downloads page on TechGalaxy.net and download the Windows Installer version 2.0. Reboot your computer in the normal mode. For more information on this topic, check out Microsoft’s KB article Q315346.

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One of the major development features that didn’t make it from Windows 2000 to Windows XP was the ability to host multiple virtual Web servers on a single machine. Essentially, Microsoft disabled (hid) the menu item in the IIS Management Console that allows you create a new virtual server.

Steven M. Cohn describes an alternative way of creating multiple virtual servers in Windows XP Pro in his blog. He shows you how the feature is only hidden, not stripped out completely. While you cannot create a new virtual server through the MMC, you can still use the administrative scripts that come with IIS, specifically, the adsutil.vbs script.

According to Steven, the caveat in this whole thing is that while you can create multiple virtual Web servers on a single Windows XP Pro machine, you can only run one at a time. Even applying a unique port number to each virtual server doesn’t seem to work. But it’s not so bad…all you have to do is open the IIS MMC, stop the currently running virtual server and start the one you want. You can read the entire article posted in his blog.

You can also download a free graphical tool called IIS Admin. The tool allows you to create multiple Web sites on Windows XP Professional and easily switch between them.

Yet another method is to use an ISAPI filter which runs at the root, interrogates the host header of the incoming HTTP request and on the outcome of that redirects the request to the relevant place in the file system. Click here for more details.

The death of the world famous Blue Screen of Death has been greatly exaggerated. According to Michael Kaplin’s blog, when he installed Longhorn’s Beta 1 on a Virtual PC he experienced the following Red Screen of Death.

Apparently, Microsoft is introducing a new kind of “screen of death” for more serious problems….a Red Screen of Death. Don’t worry, you don’t need to delete your Blue Screen of Death screen saver from your PC quite yet as Microsoft will still be using Blue Screen of Death in Longhorn for normal system crashes.

What’s interesting, Michael notes, is that a while back BBspot had a humorous article Microsoft: The Next 25 Years which “predicted” that Microsoft will introduce the Red Screen of Death in the year 2016. OK, it’s not 2016 yet but their prediction may soon become a reality.

Today I was teaching Microsoft’s Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Best Practices Workshop and ran into a problem where the students’ Virtual PCs refused to raise Domain Functional level from Windows 2000 Native to Windows Server 2003. The two DCs were able to ping each other by name, the replication (repadmin /syncall /P) worked fine and revealed no errors. The error said that the domain controller was too busy so the functional level could not be raised. The Event Viewer showed error 2042.

This TechNet article explains in more detail how to resolve the issue. According to the article “If a domain controller has not replicated with its partner for longer than a tombstone lifetime, it is possible that a lingering object problem exists on one or both domain controllers. When this condition occurs, inbound replication with the source partner is stopped on the destination domain controller and event ID 2042 is logged in the Directory Services event log.”

By adding the Allow Replication with Divergent and Corrupted Partner registry key and then replicating the A.D. database, the students were able to raise the Domain Functional level.