2 Microsoft Tips

It just dawned on me it has been ages since I published a tech tip. The following 2 tips come from direct personal experience, both mine and colleagues'.

1. The dreaded IE7 syndrome - whether Microsoft realizes it or not, not all web applications out there support IE7 - even though it has been out for 3 years or so.
   That doesn't stop the nice boys (and girls) in Redmond from pushing IE7 as a crucial update on the automatic update service.
   
   As it happens, some colleagues of mine (and even one customer I managed to assist) woke up one morning with IE7 installed. Other than the fact the UI shocked them a bit, several applications they had to use in their daily work stopped working (there are several, but the main one is Siebel CRM). I had at least 4 people ask me this question and the answer is simple:
   
   1. Uninstall IE7 - this reverts your OS back to IE6 (provided it was there to begin with! Do not try in Vista or Windows 2008!). Don't forget to reboot.
   2. Go to the Windows Update site and hide the IE7 update, so you won't get it again. Ignore the warnings - they were written by the marketing department .
   
   And that's it - all is well with the world. Until IE8 gets forcefully planted on your machine.
   
   
2. The case of the misinstalled IM - I use MSN Messenger (now known as Live Messenger) as my IM client - in all three of my machines (XP, Vista, Mac OS).
   
   About 3 weeks ago, i started observing a strange behavior (on the Windows based machines, my Mac is Ok): whenever I started the application, an installer window came up, started running something and failed with error 2771 (which I later found out is "resource missing"). It stopped the auto sign-in process, but I could still sign in manually and use the IM client well. It was annoying.
   
   After some analysis and recording I found out it's a registry key missing. Further reading suggested many people started suffering from this symptom after installing SP3 on XP or SP1 on Vista (both of which I've installed). There were several resolution suggestions (in lieu of the fact Microsoft didn't publish an updat or a solution until now).
   
   Some articles recommended deleting a registry key, involving the IM's policy, others suggested registering a dll that might have gotten unregistered during the SP's installation.
   
   But the real solution, that worked for me twice now is: uninstall and reinstall the IM. Don't worry about your contacts etc. - these are kept as part of your Passport ID.

So, two problems - one solution.