Odds & Sods Windows & I.E. Tips July 22, 2001 Here are some miscellaneous tips for Windows & I.E. that you may find useful. Lost "Control Panel" returned! Go into REGEDIT and drill down to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer. DELETE the entry "NoControlPanel" and restart your PC...your Control Panel will now reappear!! Has your Taskbar gone to the dogs? Go into the Registry with REGEDIT.EXE from the RUN command and drill down to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer. Now Delete "StuckRects" and Restart Windows. Got messed up Icons on your Desktop, or they periodically change to something else? In C:\WINDOWS locate the file ShellIconCache and delete it. Restart Windows, the file will re-create itself and all should look OK! If your Taskbar becomes screwed-up, then touch the Vertical Bar just to the right of Start. It should turn into a left-right arrow. Now, right-click and choose Refresh. Ever had the little Speaker disappear from your Taskbar in the Lower-Right hand corner? To make it re-appear, go to START - CONTROL PANEL - MULTIMEDIA. At the Bottom-Left of the screen you will see a checkbox that says "Show volume control on taskbar". Even if it is checked, uncheck it, then re-check it. Now the little speaker will re-appear, and you have full control once again. For a full listing of keyboard shortcuts go to the Start menu/help/keyboard schortcuts/displaying with keyboard and voila - you have the whole list. In IE, if you paste username and password, it will not ask to save them; you must type at least one letter from the username, you can paste it, backup one and type the last letter. If that save dialog came up once and by mistake you said no, it will not popup again on the same url. You could try modifying your bookmark (URL) a little to try to fool IE, for example remove the www. part of the url. To disable the opening Outlook Express screen: Start Regedit Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Identities For OE 5 go below this to {ABE2B8A0-C02D-11D3-867B-948FF355BD32} \ Software \ Microsoft \ Outlook Express \ 5.0 Add a DWORD NoSplash Give it a value of 1 In Win2K or WinNT you can quickly launch Task manager by: Right clicking on the Windows taskbar and chosing 'Task Manager...' Outlook Express Message Extraction OE5 has a proprietary binary format that makes archiving individual messages difficult. In addition, a number of people have indicated that their message folders have become corrupted and OE can not read them. Consequently, they have lost all the messages in that folder. DBXtract.exe extracts all mail and news messages from individual dbx files. After extracting the messages one can drag them from a Windows Explorer folder into an Outlook Express mail folder. Backing up your e-mail messages Outlook Express saves all the messages in each mail folder with a .dbx extension. To find out where these are stored, simply right-click a folder in Outlook Express and choose Properties. To back up your mail, clean out any garbage using: File, Folders, Compact all Folders, then copy the .dbx files somewhere safe. They're often quite large, so ideally you will need a Zip disk or Network access. You can then copy the duplicates back into the mail folder if the originals get corrupted! Compacting mail folders In outlook Express Every now and then it's a good idea to compact your mail folders, it saves space on your hard drive and seems to reduce the frequency of Outlook Express crashing. To do this, make sure you are using the e-mail part of the program, then goto the File menu and choose Folder, Compact All Folders Delete individual AutoComplete entries in I.E. It's possible to delete an individual entry which AutoComplete has remembered for you in a form, rather than clearing the whole lot. To do so, double-click inside the text-field you want to remove the cached entry from. This will bring up a list of all entries for this text-field. Simply point to the one you want to remove and press the delete key. Note: This doesn't appear to work for the AutoComplete feature in the address bar. Windows Explorer Tip If you want Windows Explorer to open to drive C: for example... 1. Click Start, point to Programs, point to Accessories, and then right-click Windows Explorer. 2. Click Properties, and then type the following text in the TARGET box: "%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /n,/e,c:\" (without the quotation marks) 3. Click OK. If you want to open to a specific folder on the C: drive such as the Winnt folder for example, then of course the command would be.. %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /n,/e,c:\winnt Notice that this line goes in the Target line, not the Start In line.