Technology Day! Story time...

Well, it's Thursday, so it must be Technology Day.

Instead of some tech advice, I've got a story of woe.  It's about me and my day today.

Usually, I see Murphy (as in Murphy's Law) maybe once a week, sometimes less.  He does show up - I do work with high tech, after all (IF you call Micro$oft's stuff high tech!).  But because we've got a good support group, we are rather good at keeping him at bay.

Usually.

Today, he found a way in, and he stopped in MY shop.  Spent all dang day there, carrying this big, black nasty cudgel - you know, the ones they depict in the comix with the huge freaking nail stuck through the end?  Yeah, that one - and he used it to beat me silly every chance he got.  Sadistically.  Wearing a big, smirky smile.

It really started a few days ago, when Adobe Captivate suddenly decided to stop loading.  On any machine, for both versions 5.5 and 6.  No rhyme or reason to it, it just decided to start freezing at the splash screen.

Today, I did get one machine to take 5.5 and it worked!  Hallelujah!  Choirs of angels sang!  So, as we agreed in our trouble shooting conference yesterday, I then installed 6.  Carefully copied the installation files to the local hard disk and unpacked them.  Ran them under my Domain Superman account.  Everything possible.

Rebooted after the install was finished.  Ran Captivate 6 - it stalled.  Damn.  Rebooted, ran 5.5 and IT stalled.  Double Damn!  Back to the beginning, right where we started.  Gonna call Adobe support tomorrow.

Wham!  Murphy strikes again.

Second laptop.  Lady came to me, complained that all her shortcuts were launching Windows Picture Viewer.  ALL of them.  So, I checked, and sure enough, every dang one had that same icon picture on it, and every dang one opened that same app.  Had one of these last week, ended up re-imaging it, because Windows 7 doesn't allow deleting profiles like XP did - in part due to our restrictive GPOs.

So, I played it careful - I talked to our new Windows 7 expert and he eventually pointed me to a set of instructions.  Remove the profile folder from the Users folder, launch regedit, go to a certain key and kill the hive associated with that user's folder.

Simple, right?  I launch and use regedit a hundred times a week, right?  Not this time.  The OS primly informed me that I had no such access permissions.  Went to the Windows directory, ran it from there.  Same denial.  Put my already privileged account into the Admin group, even though Domain Admins were already there - same error.  Had to re-image this machine too.

Wham!  Murphy strikes again.

So, I trek upstairs to install a monitor driver for someone whose big 27" monitor was no longer showing her laptop screen, which was supposed to be shared to it.  Logged her off, logged into the Domain Superman account, downloaded the driver from Dell's site and ran the installer.

Rebooted.

Blue screen.

Wham!  Murphy strikes again.

Gotta take this one up to Gaithersburg tomorrow to let the encryption team pull the data off of this encrypted drive before I re-image it.

Tonight, I am going to treat myself.  I deserve it.