Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

This doesn't bode well for the rumored upcoming layoffs at Microsoft. It seems the Zune group has egg on their face due to a bug that handles leap years in the internal clock driver code path of the Zune 30. On a good note, as soon as it hits January 1st, 2009, the devices will work again.

You can read the gory details here.

A cut and paste of the interesting aspects of that post:

Early this morning we were alerted by our customers that there was a widespread issue affecting our 2006 model Zune 30GB devices (a large number of which are still actively being used). The technical team jumped on the problem immediately and isolated the issue: a bug in the internal clock driver related to the way the device handles a leap year. The issue should be resolved over the next 24 hours as the time change moves to January 1, 2009. We expect the internal clock on the Zune 30GB devices will automatically reset tomorrow (noon, GMT). By tomorrow you should allow the battery to fully run out of power before the unit can restart successfully then simply ensure that your device is recharged, then turn it back on. If you’re a Zune Pass subscriber, you may need to sync your device with your PC to refresh the rights to the subscription content you have downloaded to your device.

We know this has been a big inconvenience to our customers and we are sorry for that, and want to thank them for their patience.

Q: Why is this issue isolated to the Zune 30 device?
It is a bug in a driver for a part that is only used in the Zune 30 device.

Q: What fixes or patches are you putting in place to resolve this situation?
This situation should remedy itself over the next 24 hours as the time flips to January 1st.

Q: What’s the timeline on a fix?
The issue Zune 30GB customers are experiencing today will self resolve as time changes to January 1.

Q: Why did this occur at precisely 12:01 a.m. on December 31, 2008?
There is a bug in the internal clock driver causing the 30GB device to improperly handle the last day of a leap year.

Q: What is Zune doing to fix this issue?
The issue should resolve itself.

Q: Are you sure that this won’t happen to all 80, 120 or other flash devices?
This issue is related to a part that is only used in Zune 30 devices.

Q: How many 30GB Zune devices are affected? How many Zune 30GB devices were sold?
All 30GB devices are potentially affected.

Shame on the firmware developers for letting something like this happen on the Zune 30. No fix yet. Thankfully our 4GB and 8GB Zune seem immune.

You can watch the story unfold on the Zune.net forums here. It is particularly unfortunate because music devices like this are popular for house mixes during New Years parties.

It has also hit CNN, which will only give it more bad press.

I haven't run into this one personally but I noticed it linked off of LCSKid's site, pointing to an escalation engineer blog entry here.

Long story short, AOL changed their certificate signer, and you'll need to grab/import the updated authority from https://pki-info.aol.com/AOL/.

It looks like a work-in-progress as he upgrades/installs OCS R2 with the various issues and things-not-mentioned-in-the-documentation type situations. If you are prepping for an upgrade or an install, it might be worth a look over at his site to avoid any already known pitfalls.

With that said, at some point soon, I need to upgrade my home desktop to be x64 capable and join in on the fun.

This brings the build version up to 2.0.6362.111.

The issues fixed that are brand new to this build are:
Office Communicator 2007 cannot display Chinese characters in URLs when the EnableURL registry value is enabled
You cannot prevent Office Communicator 2007 from controlling the call forwarding settings

For those curious, the Communicator 2007 R2 RTM build number is 3.5.6907.0. I am also guessing that there are some undocumented (for now) inter-op fixes with OCS 2007 R2 servers. Previously, you needed the October 2008 update to inter-op with OCS 2007 R2, but I believe this update will become the new standard.

Read more about it here and download the .MSP (.MSI transform) from here.

You might run into this with a QIP-based DHCP as a backend with XP SP3 clients: Some DHCP Options are not recognized on a Windows XP SP3-based client computer when the DHCP server offer includes option 43. Install KB 953761.

Long story, short: Due to the addition of vendor specific options of the XP SP3 DHCP client request, relating to NAP, the code expects DHCP options to be returned in a certain order. When paired with a MS-based DHCP server, correct behavior is observed. If used with a different DHCP server that might reorder the DHCP reply, the original XP SP3 DHCP client code might not correctly set all DHCP settings.

There is a two page thread on the TechNet forums about this issue here.

Worth a read – it is an issue with Server 2008 clustering:

The issue appears at this time to be related to how Windows 2008 clusters handle file share / file server resources.

The Fix

Install KB 955733 - Incorrect status codes that are returned in failover clusters may cause operations to fail on a Windows Server 2008-based computer. This ensures that the cluster returns the correct status codes where necessary.

If all goes as planned, I'll be helping out moderate the Windows 7 forums on Technet. Hopefully, it might indirectly generate some Windows 7 content for this blog as time goes on. I have a long history with Windows 7 already, so I'll be putting it to the test shortly.

In case you have unsolved issues with Outlook, check the list of issues fixed here to see if they might finally be resolved now.

I’m hearing good things about Outlook 2007 SP2 in regards to performance, and this seems to be a step in the right direction (even though it isn’t SP2 yet).

It brings your Outlook build to:
12.0.6335.5000 SP1 MSO (12.0.6333.5000)

Outlook update from October was:
12.0.6331.5000 SP1 MSO (12.0.6320.5000)

Super fun fact for the curious:
The MSO build/revision number is related to the Office shared DLL called MSO.DLL. It is used by practically all the Office suite. Most of the fixes in this release seem to be related to the shared DLL.

Noteworthy fixes (to me):
When the sender of an e-mail message has Send As permissions to another mailbox, the From field of the printed e-mail message incorrectly contains "on behalf of" text.

The same profile is listed two times in the Choose Profile dialog box of Outlook 2007 when you create a new profile that contains some extended characters in the name. This issue occurs if the Outlook Mobile Service Add-in is enabled.

Outlook 2007 may crash if an application on the Microsoft Exchange server responds to port 80 requests for availability information from Outlook.

Interesting things discovered over the past week:

OCS Communicator 2007 R2 seems to work fine when talking to OCS 2007 R1 backend.
OCS Communicator 2007 R2 mobile seems to work fine when talking to OCS 2007 R1 backend.

Caveat: Custom presence with XML files seem to be still supported but broken in this release, as it was broken in the RC client. This is typically how I set my status to “Working from home” or “Working from client site”. I’m hoping I can figure out a workaround.

More info about all the fun stuff in OCS R2 will be posted as soon as we verify NDA status - the floodgates will open but I want to make sure we're in the clear.

This is a first for her on Jones Soda bottles. Her sister has been on 6 or 7 bottles across the nation so far, so she needs to play catch up.
The actual picture was taken on the Coopersville train. She was in a crabby mood and was sticking her tongue out. Thankfully, it worked out to her advantage because it ended up becoming a cute picture.

If you bump into this bottle in the stores, please let me know. I might buy it off of you.

These wireless chipsets are commonly found on Dell laptops and many other OEM add-in cards.

Thankfully, the functionality bcmwltry.exe provides has been implemented in the operating system now with the newer service packs. You can simply rename %windir%\system32\bcmwltry.exe to %windir%\system32\bcmwltry.exe.bad without any ill effect. In certain circumstances, the process would leak 2GB+ of RAM within a few hours.

There are reports that the newer versions of the Broadcom drivers do not leak memory with bcmwltry.exe, but I see no reason for keeping the executable around.

You can read other people's trials and tribulations with this here, and here.

I do not try to sound like a Broadcom basher on here, but I am amazed at the amount of issues that have shown up over the past few years related to their wired and wireless drivers. Their hardware seems very solid, and I'm hoping they are working on improving their QA process for software drivers.

If you are running Windows 7 pre-beta, you might have noticed that the old 'Add Legacy Hardware' option seems to be missing. I tend to use this quite a bit whenever I need to add in a Loopback adapter or some piece of hardware that is not quite installing correctly. Plug and Play, even in 2008, isn't always 100% correct.

With that said, thankfully, you can still manually launch the 'Add Legacy Hardware' Control Panel applet by using hdwwiz.cpl.

Update: Between the time this was originally written and the official beta came out, it is now hdwwiz.exe. Pre-7000 builds used hdwwiz.cpl.

Backup programs that use VSS (Volume Shadow Service) also tend to use the Virtual Disk Service to perform backups and restores. Is your Server 2008 based Backup Exec server leaking memory? You might want to investigate this hotfix due to memory leaks in the Virtual Disk Service (VDS) code.

A hotfix is available that addresses a memory leak in the Virtual Disk Service on a computer that is running Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008.

Scenario 1
A memory leak occurs in the Virtual Disk Service when an application uses the Virtual Disk Service to enumerate disk resources. In this scenario, you notice that the memory consumption of the Virtual Disk Service (Vds.exe) increases continually.

Scenario 2
The computer uses a Virtual Disk Service hardware provider to connect to a disk array. When an application uses the Virtual Disk Service to enumerate disk resources, a memory leaks occurs in the Virtual Disk Service and in the Virtual Disk Service hardware provider. In this scenario, you notice that the memory consumption of both the Virtual Disk Service and the Virtual Disk Service hardware provider increases continually.

The severity of this problem depends on how frequently your application calls the Virtual Disk Service. Sometimes, this problem may not cause significant issues. However, when the memory consumption becomes significant, the system may crash, or jobs may fail. This situation typically occurs when your production environment does not let you periodically restart the Virtual Disk Service.

This KB article has already fixed printer driver issues for a client of mine, related to bulk updates of printer drivers and printer queues on Windows 2003/XP computers.

It affects a fairly specific but common scenario for Server 2003/XP print servers.

Consider the following scenario:
You install multiple printers on a printer server. Printer clients that are running Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP create network printers by using this printer server. On the printer server, you upgrade all the printer drivers at the same time. Additionally, these printer drivers share one or more of the same binary files (very common with HP printer drivers). After the drivers are updated on the server, the printer clients upgrade their printer queues at the same time. In this scenario, some printer driver files are not upgraded on the printer clients. Therefore, some printer clients cannot use these network printers.

I suspect either there are race conditions in the driver update code or the printer drivers are not coded to expect to be upgraded concurrently.

With this hotfix, you can serialize all updates, or per manufacturer updates are serialized, or allow the original behavior of concurrent updates for all drivers.

This is controlled by a brand new DWORD registry setting:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\SerializeDriverInstallsAndUpgrades

If the value of the SerializeDriverInstallsAndUpgrades registry entry is set to 0, all upgrades of printer drivers from all printer manufacturers can be performed at the same time. This is the same as if the hotfix had not been applied.

If the value of the SerializeDriverInstallsAndUpgrades registry entry is set to 1, all upgrades of printer drivers from the same printer manufacturer are serialized. In this situation, there can be multiple upgrades of printer drivers from different printer manufacturers in progress at the same time. However, if two printer drivers are from the same printer manufacturer, the upgrades of these drivers cannot be performed at the same time.

If the value of the SerializeDriverInstallsAndUpgrades registry entry is set to 2, all upgrades of printer drivers from all printer manufacturers are serialized. In this situation, there can be only one upgrade of a printer driver from any printer manufacturer at any particular time.