The Outlook Inbox Repair tool (aka: ScanPST.exe) is built to scan and correct corruption in Outlook personal folder/.PST files (see MS KB #287947 for basic PST repair instructions). A novel and unsupported use of the ScanPST utility is for recovery of deleted emails.

ScanPST normally recovers emails in the Deleted Items folder, but is designed to ignore email messages already emptied from that folder. Emails emptied from the Deleted Items folder may be ignored, but they are not removed permanently from a PST file until the file is compacted. By manually editing a PST file to create a corruption and then scanning the file any deleted emails that remain will be restored to the Deleted Items folder. Directions are at the Outlook Tips website.

Beware that this is an advanced fix - as if the need for a hex editor wouldn’t clue you in.

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Instead of constantly rebuilding a foundation, when helping new Windows users I prefer to send them to websites that already have instructions and screenshots displayed. Often they’ll do a bit of digging and learn a whole lot more than I ever could have typed up for them.

To help with a user’s home PC questions, I was just searching for instructions on how to disable the Windows XP Security Center. That fix was in a larger PC World article “20 Things They Don’t Want You to Know” that includes some great info I know I’ve looked for too, including toll-free numbers for Amazon & eBay and new password recovery utilities that are worth including in my own “traveling tech” CD.

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…and today was a bummer. I spent way too long troubleshooting a client’s new desktop application. It was supposed to be a quick install of a single executable and a config.ini file, a check for recent .NET Framework updates, and logging in. Little did I know that my client was running the WinXP firewall inside their network. Little did my client know either. They had installed the latest XP service pack without realizing the SP2 firewall is on by default. Now that it was on they didn’t want me to turn it off…

A quick search found a list of the ports needed to be opened for SQL Server on the firewall, and a script you can add to your login process to push the ports out to all client machines. If scripting isn’t your thing, then use these manual firewall configuration settings with screenshots.

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Redmond mag’s Movin’ On Up, 2005 IT salary survey says salaries are up this year. The one thing missing is a single shred of data in the article to compare 2005’s survey to numbers from 2004. Without a comparison who knows if Redmond’s subscribers aren’t always on the high end of the salary range for IT employees, certainly possible since they’re a “free subscription for IT management” magazine. That being said, a quick search turns up the 2004 IT salary survey, from when Redmond was named MCP Magazine.

Redmond’s 2005 results might make you rethink your current salary. In almost every job title and certification category salaries are up about 5-10%. …similar to what my friends and I have seen on the job market recently, it’s worth doing some local reaserch to see if your salary is competitive anymore. Unless you’re close to a certification now, just toss your resume out there instead of holding back until you can get certified. As a hiring manager I’ve passed over a number of certified sysadmins and engineers recently. Techs with longer work experience and a steady, long-term job history (no job-hopping) seem to integrate better into the team and the cooperative environment we need to handle being both busy and short-staffed.

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After complaining last month that it’s near-impossible to find new Microsoft updates, since a Microsoft.com search returns bad results and the big engines don’t update often enough, I’ve found a better list of Outlook updates. The official Office site lists all Outlook 2003 updates on one page. Of course, it’s going to be difficult to find the page in already busy Favorites or desktop search result lists…

There is a new Outlook Junk mail filter (MS KB #902953, released 8/22/2005) listed at that page, as well all past updates. So, if you’re stuck with a mediocre anti-spam solution and use Outlook, keeping the Junk E-mail filter updated helps scrub out a good proportion of worst-offender junk mail.

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The “External Windows Handler” is a plug-in installed in the default Adobe Acrobat setup (highlighted below, in Reader 7.0 default plug-in screenshot) and required when a PDF is opened in the window of another application, such as IE or content management apps. Should one of those external applications crash with a PDF open it can corrupt any Acrobat plug-ins in use at the time of the crash. The next time an external Acrobat window is opened by another application the error “Could Not Find External Window Handler” will appear.

Common with the old versions 4.x and 5.x of Acrobat, this message is increasingly less-common with the better-coded and more stable Acrobat versions 6.x and 7.x. Nonetheless, the fix is a simple reinstallation of the Adobe Acrobat application. Unless a newer version Acrobat is being installed it isn’t necessary to uninstall the Acrobat software with the missing plug-in prior to the reinstallation.

(Click to enlarge:)

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In recent months new NetGear RangeMax and Linksys SRX wireless adapters have been configured to require that respective manufacturer’s wireless management utility to be installed with the drivers. This is a problem because both managment tools cause errors when running on a Windows XP PC with Service Pack 2 installed. There are even several reviews of the RangeMax PCI adapter on Amazon that report the NetGear configuration utility causes crashes and excess CPU usage.

The fix…
Simple. First, don’t uninstall the NetGear or Linksys software. That will probably remove the drivers for the card too. Instead, disable the NetGear or Linksys configuration software by pulling them from the Programs menu’s Startup folder and the registry startup items (Open regedit > then HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run/ > and delete any references to the software). Then just follow the steps in this Microsoft Knowledge Base article to enable the Wireless Zero Config. (WZC) service: “Error Message in Wireless Network Setup Wizard…“. That’s it, no reboot required, the Windows WZC should pop up a message about detected networks in a few seconds.

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