How to get rid off the “Suggested Sites” button from the IE Favorite Bar

Some people hate it and some love it. I use the Favorite Bar in IE a lot and enable it by default on my browser. Just right-click an empty area near the address bar in IE and tick the Favorite Bar.

Only their will be a moment you have to many shortcuts on your bar and than you get an anoying little pulldown arrow on the rightside of the bar. If that’s the case just use favorites what they are for initially.

So I always keep the ammount till the little arrow appears and stop. But just to make some room I delete the default Suggested Sites thingy as I never ever ever used it. And now the anoying thing the little bugger always returns and pushes my über favorites from my Favorite Bar. I think it’s a conspericy with the little arrow.

Unfortunately we cannot delete it but we can disable it 🙂 anyways I just don’t want him to come back.

Here’s how to do it,

1. Open a Run command Windows flag +R and type gpedit.msc
2. Go to User Configuration >> Administrative templates >> Windows Components >> Internet Explorer
3. Look for the “Turn on Suggested Sites” policy, double click and you see it never been configured. Just choos disable and your set to go.

Now it should not return anymore.

Event ID 10 – Windows Management Instrumentation

Whenever I scroll true the Windows Event Logs I have the tendency to try to get rid of all the nice red error en yellow warning messages. They appear for a reason and if it’s possible I always like to fix it. 

Sometimes I notice a WMI error with event ID 10 in the Application Log section. It seems to appear every time the system reboots.

 Event filter with query “SELECT * FROM __InstanceModificationEvent WITHIN 60 WHERE TargetInstance ISA “Win32_Processor” AND TargetInstance.LoadPercentage > 99″ could not be reactivated in namespace “//./root/CIMV2” because of error 0x80041003. Events cannot be delivered through this filter until the problem is corrected.

 

What is WMI?
WMI stands for Windows Management Instrumentation and let you control certain tasks or read information of a local or remote system. Here you find more information about WMI. ttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee692772.aspx

 

How to fix it?
There are two ways of fixing this,

1. Boot in Safe mode
2. Stop the “Windows Management Instrumentation Service”
3. And take ownership of the folder or the contents of the folder “C:\Windows\System32\wbem\Repository”
4. Restart the system and notice it will not come back. The old messages stay until you delete them.

The method Microsoft gives us is by a VB script. This will script will fix the error but will not stop WMI functionality it continue to work as long as the Windows Service is started. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950375 

1. Copy and paste the script below in a text file and rename the extention *.txt to *.vbs
2. Run it and a few popups with interesting reading flash by, just click ok a few times.
3. Restart the system and you notice the message is not appearing any more.

 

strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" _
& strComputer & "\root\subscription")

Set obj1 = objWMIService.Get("__EventFilter.Name='BVTFilter'")

set obj2set = obj1.Associators_("__FilterToConsumerBinding")

set obj3set = obj1.References_("__FilterToConsumerBinding")

For each obj2 in obj2set
                WScript.echo "Deleting the object"
                WScript.echo obj2.GetObjectText_
                obj2.Delete_
next

For each obj3 in obj3set
                WScript.echo "Deleting the object"
                WScript.echo obj3.GetObjectText_
                obj3.Delete_
next

WScript.echo "Deleting the object"
WScript.echo obj1.GetObjectText_
obj1.Delete_

Windows Updates error 9c48

At the moment I’m deploying 10 new VM’s to host a SharePoint 2010 farm. Beside a little bit of clicking here and clicking their I’m running multiple v-sphere consoles with the good old Windows Updates. After a few reboots I’m getting a nice error message forcing me to stop. No magical reboots can help me out of this one.

I made sure no group policies are aplied to the VM so how to get rid of the pescie Windows Update 9c48 error

The solution is simpeler then exspected. Just go to the control panel and uninstall IE 9.0. After an other reboot just run the updates again but first click check updates so you get more updates then Windows show you. After this little escapade it’s back to business.

Mark Russinovich’s Windows Troubleshooting

I just watched this great presentation from Mark Russinovich (Sysinternal tools) about troubleshooting unexplained Windows mysteries. It’s just an hour and a few minutes but it’s time well spent and a great laugh. I was pointed out on this video true the TechNet Flash newsletter. Just follow the link and enjoy.

Video: Mark Russinovich’s Windows Troubleshooting

Mark Russinovich, the master of Windows troubleshooting, walks you step-by-step through how he has solved seemingly unsolvable system and application problems on Windows, including how to apply the Microsoft Debugging Tools and his own Sysinternals tools to solve system crashes, process hangs, security vulnerabilities, DLL conflicts, permissions problems, registry misconfiguration, network hangs, and file system issues.