Corey Gouker's Machine Inside the Mind

I was using something else before, Feedburner I guess, I suppose I could keep using it, but it seemed limited. While using Redfin today I noticed they had the Share on Facebook with the down arrow and that it was using the AddThis.com service. Registered real quick grabbed the generated code and popped it in. Had to refer to the macro definitions for dasBlog but it seems to be working right now, the code looks like this:

<!-- ADDTHIS BUTTON BEGIN -->
<script type="text/javascript">
addthis_pub = 'YOUR USER NAME';
</script><a href="http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php" onMouseOver="return addthis_open(this, '', '<%PermalinkUrlRaw%>', '<%itemTitleRaw%>')" onMouseOut="addthis_close()" onClick="return addthis_sendto()"><img src="http://s9.addthis.com/button1-addthis.gif" width="125" height="16" border="0" alt="" /></a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/152/addthis_widget.js"></script>           
<!-- ADDTHIS BUTTON BEGIN -->

This will work well for any dasBlog user just change the username, users of other services will need to figure out the permalink url and item title macro for their service.

This is a fairly common problem which leaves a lot of users scratching their heads as to how to just make things work. There are a couple reasons one would encounter this. The most common is because an application or process still has the file open (technically it's called a 'handle to the file'). Another possibility would be if the permissions on the file you were trying to delete were invalid. Without getting too in depth into the how and why there are two quick things to check on when trying to get around the problem.

I'll go over the first reason in this post. In the Windows SysInternals suite, there is a tool called Process Explorer, which is an amazingly powerful app. It will allow you to view what's going on behind the scenes of most everything running on the system. Just doing quick search will show just how powerful this tool is. For this issue though, what we'll do is find any open handles on the file we're trying to access and delete.

1. First, start Process Explorer.
2. Press CTRL+F to open a search window.
3. In the 'Handle or DLL substring' field type in a portion or the complete name of the file you are trying to delete and press Enter to begin the search. In my case the file was "08 mer du japon.mp3".
4. You should now be presented with a list of open handles. Next double click on the handle in the search window to show the file handle highlighted in the lower pane along with all the other open handles on the system.
5. Right click the row for the handle and click Close Handle.
6. You should now be good to go.

In this particular case it would seem the handle to the .MP3 file wasn't properly closed by Windows Media Player despite it having finished playing and updating the metadata. Because of this I was unable to move the album folder. By using Process Explorer I was able to find the culprit and close down the handle which allowed Vista full access to move the file and folder. There are some other third-party tools available as well as other tips and ways of doing the same thing. However, I highly recommend the method I just described, as using and further exploring Process Explorer and the other tools available in the SysInternals suite of applications will allow you to gain a much greater understanding of your system.

This, combined with a few good search queries, a deep curiosity through Wikipedia, and the Microsoft Knowledge Base will help turn any enthusiast into a real power user. Check back shortly for part two where I discuss how to take back ownership of your files and folders through permissions in Windows Vista and Server 2008.

I was in a team meeting thing the other day and had my laptop out taking notes. Unfortuantely despite the fact I always run with all system sounds off, I kept on getting the annoying system beep every so often. It was maybe coming from Outlook and holding down the backspace for too long. It happens even if you mute the sound on the system, and heck, even if you disable the "System speaker" device in Device Manager which is listed under the System devices. And man is the beep loud, amusing really, since the mono speaker on my Dell Latitude D430 is barely audible but that bloody system beep is loud as hell and definitely attention grabbing.

So here's how to disable the Beep, yes that's actually what it's called.

1. Press WIN+R
2. Type in devmgmt.msc and press Enter.
3. Click the View menu then click Show hidden devices.
4. Expand the Non-Plug and Play Drivers branch out.
5. Look for Beep and double-click the device to bring up the properties window.
6. Click on the Driver tab.
7. Under Current status, click Stop.
8. Under Startup type drop down switch the driver to Disabled.
9. Click OK

You'll now have true silence from your desktop or laptop PC regardless of whatever crazy error messages pop up or however much spam gets delivered to your Inbox. Though this won't help if you if you've got a bunch of 80mm fans running at 8000RPM still . But that's for another post... Tip though, voltage converters for fans or fans with a high CFM and low dB rating work amazingly well as do rubber gromets for fans and HDD's and not to mention that Dynamat isn't half bad for noise absorbtion as well.

This is a common question on XP and even Vista. If you do a basic search with Google or Live you'll actually get mixed information with many people (including some Microsoft sources) saying that sharing of networked content is not possible. However let it be known that it is possible and this information is available directly from Microsoft's own sharing FAQ's.

If you want to share files in a monitored folder that is located on another computer (for example, a folder on a network share), the remote folder must have the appropriate Windows access permissions assigned to it and the computer that contains the library you want to share has remote content sharing enabled. You can enable remote content sharing by performing the following procedure on the computer that contains the library you are sharing.

1.	Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2.	In the registry tree (on the left), expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SOFTWARE, Microsoft, MediaPlayer, and then Preferences.
3.	Right-click HME, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4.	Type EnableRemoteContentSharing, and then press ENTER.
5.	Right-click EnableRemoteContentSharing, and then click Modify.
6.	In the Value data text box, type 1, and then click OK. If you later decide to disable remote content sharing, you can repeat this procedure and change the value to 0.

For more information, see Windows Media Player FAQ.

I should also note that typically you need to make sure that WMP is monitoring the network share via the UNC path so \\SERVER\Music, while you can certainly have the share mapped to a network drive this will cause issues in certain cases. So if you add M:\ for example, make sure WMP is monitoring and using \\SERVER\Music instead. Issues that come up include the networked content showing up on first use but not being able to play back, and after the machine starts the content not being up to date. For more info check out this post.

This is a mod I did a while ago. I randomly use 24-hour time and sometimes my brain just doesn't quite associate 20:05 as being 8:05pm and what not. Getting tired of figuring it out (yes I'm that lazy and don't want to subtract 12) and having a Skagen wristwatch (I rarely wear it now) that has both 12 and 24 on the face, I figured the Clock gadget in Vista should have a 24 hour face as well.

So click here to download it.
Note it is provided free without warranty or support.

I've been playing around with other ideas as well for new and modified gadgets so will post updates as they become available. Oh and while you're downloading the Cojugo 24 hour clock, also download the uTorrent Gadget... Works great, only thing missing it seems is the ability to set Labels for your torrents.

Jon ordered a new Microsoft LifeChat ZX-6000 from Amazon (using some major credit) which arrived today. There's little information about this headset, I didn't even really know it existed till he brought it up. So yeah, no real information about the base unit but we figured it was free credit so might as well try. Opened it up and sure enough the base unit reads Microsoft Xbox 360 Wireless Receiver for Windows. Plug it in, Vista sees it, it doesn't find drivers, Jon downloads the drivers from Microsoft Hardware. Install takes a good 5 minutes for the 3MB setup, totally lame, especially on Vista. The headset worked perfectly, pressed the button and up came WLM8.1, we then tried pairing the Xbox 360 Wireless controller, it paired just fine as well. Then did a short Skype call after setting the input and output to echo123 and that also worked perfectly. So awesome, a good solution to kill two birds with one stone. Only caveat that I can see is that after testing with the Xbox 360 itself I can't find a way to pair the headset with the 360. Regardless considering the receiver is $20 normally getting a nice headset and a good way to do wireless calls with Skype is worth the $30.

It's been driving me nuts ever since I started using Vista but it's finally been fixed. Apparently not caused by Plus! Live for Messenger nor WLM 8.1 itself but some bad bits for the Microsoft wireless mouse I've got. The fix went up on Windows Update the other day and since then things have been fine. The KB article for the fix is amusing to me since it talks about the issue possibly being caused by CyberLink software. Cute since this is a clean install and nothing other than WLM and Office 2007 have been installed. Either way the "HID Non-User Input Data Filter" fixes the auto away status in Messenger. My power management for disabling the monitors after 15 minutes has worked fine and the update hasn't changed that. Jason Tsang also has a bit more information regarding the update.

First an obvious one from the Sidebar... This is a known bug but it's stupid and annoying. Notice anything in the linked screenshot? According to the Sidebar and according to the Display Settings the gadgets and such should be on the right side of my left monitor. Obviously they're not. After a restart of the PC the Sidebar ends up in that location. At which point you have to pull up the properties again and set it to the right side of monitor 3.

If you have a sharp eye you might have also noticed something else. This one is a shell bug. Notice the taskbar has a bit more going on than it should? Especially over in that right side there's just stuff that should definitely be black.

Here's another example, you can clearly see what's happening here. The taskbar glass effect is grabbing the wrong portion of the image for the effect. It's taking the image from the 2nd monitor not the 1st. Here's the actual background image (converted from a BMP). Jon and I thought the fix would be to just turn glass off then on so I restarted the DWM service that didn't work. Neither did a restart. So we're not sure if this is the same known bug we've seen during the beta or something else. The fix however is to turn on the auto-hiding of the taskbar. Immediately after doing that the problem is fixed. Disabling the auto-hiding breaks it again .

One other thing you'll notice from the background image is that it doesn't quite match the screenshot of the desktop. Well this is more of a feature request and something that can be done with UltraMon but something clearly the shell team didn't have time nor thought was worthy of doing for Vista. Basically I've got 3 24" monitors at 1920x1200. I've got my main monitor 1 set to the middle where I like my taskbar. 2 is to the left, and 3 to the right. The problem is that I'm a bit more of a pixel perfectionist than most and so having one desktop background spread across all 3 monitors is a must. There's only 2 ways of doing this. First is to use a third party app like UltraMon. And the second approach is to pop open Paint or Photoshop and create an image that's the right size (5760x1200) in my case. Then paste in the 3 images to create one image to stretch about whichever way you'd please.

Now logic would dictact that WYSIWYG with the background image. You'd expect it to go 123, left, middle, right. Well that's not the correct logic according to the methods used for the Desktop Background settings in Vista. If you have a set up similar to my circumstances, which I'll concede many don't... *cough* stupid speech recognition vulnerability. Then I'm just like some at ZDNet and I'd just be making something of nothing. However, if you also have Aristotle like perfection you'll want to make sure your multimon background is set up right.

To do this you need to remember that Windows will start the background image from your "main" monitor and you need to have things set to Tile mode. In my case the monitors go 213. So while the start of image should be at the left mine is in the middle. Next you have to make sure the image flows and overflows from left to right, regardless of monitor numbering. To better illustrate this click here. Well, I hope that better illustrates things with the description:

1, Middle monitor = Left side of image in Photshop.
2, Left monitor = Right side of image in Photoshop.
3, Right monitor = Middle of image in Photoshop.

If not then maybe heading over to shellrevealed would be a good idea . Tell them that you want to be able to set a different background image for each attached display and not have to deal with this mess. Finally if you like the backgrounds shown or want to see some other cool stuff head over to mandolux.

UPDATE: Dom and I were discussing how annoying desktop icons have become. I was ranting about how I wish the Recycle Bin were a sidebar thing instead of being the only desktop icon that I'd have floating around. So I disabled it in Personalization. He instead just unchecked Show Desktop Icons from the Properties menu on the Desktop. I gave this a go just for the heck of it since I've still got a couple other temporary icons on the desktop that I didn't want to move and low and behold. The bloody taskbar glass bug was resolved. Obviously there's something funky going on here and I'm sure it wasn't really considered to be significant enough to fix since not enough people would hit it. At any rate, just a work around for anyone who wants to know...

I've been getting some spam on my blogs alias through Exchange despite the fact that I obfuscate the address on the site and despite the fact I've got the Exchange Intelligent Message Filtering turned on pretty high. So every so often I go into the Blogs folder in Outlook and hold SHIFT+DEL to get rid of that bloody email that's trying to sell me 0EM copies of Office and W1ndows. This last time I accidentally thought the email was highlighted but instead I got ahead of myself on Remote Desktop and the entire Blogs folder was deleted.

I thought I was out of luck but swore I remembered that Exchange had a way to come to my rescue. I thought it might be through the Mailbox Recovery Center but oh no. There's an even more elegant solution. With Outlook 2003 closed do the following:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedt32, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\Options
   Right-click the Options subkey, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
3. Type DumpsterAlwaysOn for the DWORD name, and then press ENTER.
4. Double-click DumpsterAlwaysOn.
5. In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
6. Quit the Registry Editor and start Outlook again. You should now have Recover Deleted Items under the expanded Tools menu.

It should be noted that this works specifically with Exchange when an email rentention policy has been set up. I've just gone and changed my server to not permanently delete email from the message store for 14 days instead of the default of 7. Here's a link to one of the KB articles I've found with a little more information and another via Office Online. For more information on how to configure Exchange to match your ideal storage limits see this KB article.

After doing a couple quick searches via MSN and Google it appears I'm actually rather late with coming up with this information. But it's nice to learn littles bits and pieces like this when you make mistakes .

One of the things that I find really annoying sometimes are the moments of listening in to some random audio and there's a tune I know I know or that I want to know but just can't think of. It may be on the tip of my tongue but it's just beyond the reach of my memory. It may not just be some song or some lyrics but may also be the name of an actor whose voice I may recognize.

Whatever the case I've decided that any time I get one of those itches that I just have to scratch I figure I'll post it up here so that hopefully later I can remember what it is that bugged me so much before I found it. Not to mention it may make it easier for someone to "finally figure it out".

The most recent one was actually rather easy but could have been much more difficult. One of my favorite programs that I download off the net broadcasted from the beeb is Top Gear. We finally got the the show in the US yet it's not quite the same. The producers of the show always seem to pick great music to go with the great cars and fantastic locations. Problem is, music credits are almost always no where to be found. Obviously sometimes there aren't even any lyrics or enough to identify the piece. In the third episode of this season there was one of those.

When I first heard it I thought it would be impossible since there were really no clear 'notes' and no lyrics, just a smooth melody. I was 100% possitive I knew it. Maybe 5 minutes later it struck me that the answer was obvious, it was someone well known for having great ambience and music that really is unique.

Brian Eno (the same guy that did the Windows 95 startup sound).

Here's a clip of the piece from the show. The melody is "An Ending (Ascent)" from Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks.

As for the other clips, I'll round up previous discoveries shortly.

In my last post about FLAC I talked about how to convert FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) using Adobe Audition. That works just fine. But what I wanted was to not have to run the individual files through Windows Media Player manually entering in data. So this time around we'll do it much more fluidly.

Basically what we do is take our copy of Nero then download and install the plugin for FLAC. Default location for plugins being C:\Program Files\Common Files\Ahead\AudioPlugins.

At this point go through the normal Audio CD creation process using Nero. If the FLAC comes with a CUE file, just drap and drop the CUE file. If not, hopefully the tracks will be numbered, just drag and drop those.

Burn the project using the Image Recorder setting. Save the NRG file somewhere. Then mount the file using Nero ImageDrive. Once this is done open up Windows Media Player and enjoy. You should find that by going to the Rip pane WMP automatically finds all the track information with album art. Hug the wonderful code behind this one that analyzes things for you. Then rip to WMA VBR or MP3 and not have to worry about the metadata.

I should also mention that if you're a fan of the SHN (Shorten) codec you can download this plugin. Then just convert the files in the same way.

If you're a fan of WMA and the way WMP manages your media as I am this is probably the easiest solution for making sure WMIS (Windows Media Information Services) gets things right.

After having 3 other MVP's help me, a former MVP who I know (he works on Exchange now) help me, I finally decided to just call. I was on hold for over an hour apparently, I didn't notice or anything since I had the headset around my neck with the volume down. It was a bit odd since it was about 3AM. He was on EDT so obviously on the night shift. Anyway rather than get into details of the call I'll just say it was great, the guy that helped me was great, deserves a 4.0 just for getting things working when no one else could.

This should be a lesson for anyone that has any sense or say on Exchange. Make the setup of OWA, FBA, RPC, etc all much easier. In terms of the things we did to make RPC work in the first place with FBA, we only checked the settings and modified one registry setting (we specified port 6001 and 6002 separately rather than doing what the KB suggests which is server:6001-6002;). Even then it didn't work, we double checked everything again redid some settings that didn't change (just for verification). Then magically everything worked. Except FBA.

To get that working he had to look through the KB and find some mysterious article that wasn't even released to the public yet. Here's a copy of the resolution for those that are curious. You'll need MetaEdit 2.2 (ignore the IIS6 warning) / Metabase Explorer from the IIS6 Resource Kit. After you get MetaData Edit you browse to the virtual server that's running OWA, go to the Rpc directory and in the right pane create a new DWORD with the value of 45054. Now just do an iisreset and things magically work. Oh and it should be noted that according to all the KB articles I found there was nothing wrong with my configuration and all the settings and such were correct to begin with. Here's the full text and a few more links that will help one down the path of agony:

PROBLEM
========
Scenario:

1) Manually create a secondary HTTP VS in ESM (so we're not using "Default Website")
2) Install RPCproxy and manually create the /rpc directory in this secondary HTTP VS through IIS Admin
3) Install an SSL cert onto the secondary HTTP VS
4) Enable Forms Based Authentication (FBA).

After step 4, the RPC-over-HTTP functionality will be broken. Attempts to manually navigate to the https://server/rpc directory will bring up the FBA sign-in screen rather than a prompt for credentials and a permissions error as expected.

RESOLUTION
==============
This is because the OwaLogon ISAPI filter is installed to the entire secondary HTTP VS when FBA is enabled. This includes all of the subdirectories of this secondary HTTP VS on which it is not explicitly excluded. Since the /rpc directory was created within IIS Administrator (not ESM), it is not affected by DS2MB metabase replication and should not be overwritten. The filter setting can be bypassed for the /rpc directory by setting property 45054 to "0" on this directory.

Steps:
1) Open up Metaedit.
2) Navigate to the LM\W3SVC and then navigate into the proper HTTP VS (in my case it was 100)
3) Click through "root" and onto "rpc".
4) In the right pane, verify that 45054 is not listed. If it is, we will modify. If it is not, we will create.
5) Assuming it's not listed, right click in the right-pane and select "New->Dword".
6) If you get an error about "trying to get property names", simply click OK. This can be ignored; not all properties are named.
7) Leave the ID drop-down as "(Other)", but change the number from "0" to "45054".
8) Check the Inherit attribute.
9) Set the "Data" field to "0" at the bottom and click OK.

With this change in place, both FBA and RPCHTTP should function on a secondary HTTP VS.

KB ARTICLE FOR RPC OVER HTTP:
==========================
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=833401

1. LINK - Exchange Server 2003 RPC over HTTP Deployment Scenarios
2. LINK - How to Deploy RPC over HTTP for the First Time on Exchange Server 2003 SP1, No Front-End Server
3. LINK - How to configure RPC over HTTP on a single server in Exchange Server 2003
4. LINK - How to use the RPC Ping utility to troubleshoot connectivity issues with the Exchange over the Internet feature in Outlook 2003
5. LINK - How to troubleshoot client RPC over HTTP connection issues in Office Outlook 2003
6. LINK - Exchange ActiveSync and Outlook Mobile Access errors occur when SSL or forms-based authentication is required for Exchange Server 2003

And finally the steps above for RPC over HTTP with OWA FBA is a yet to be released KB article so I can't reference it, but maybe a search for 45054 might reveal something.

If you're having trouble with OWA FBA or RPC over HTTP, post in the comments and we'll see about triaging the issue and maybe get it working .

Granted, I'm still under contract with Cingular but I've finally gotten around to SIM unlocking the SMT5600. There's this nice little zip file on the forums, smt5600_unlock.zip, which lets you unblock the SIM lock on the phone. You need to have ActiveSync installed and then you have to run the app provided, restart the phone, and that's pretty much it.

To test I popped in Jon's Rogers SIM card from Canada and it connected to T-Mobile here just fine. Thank you to whoever first figured out how to unlock this thing and thank you MSN Search and Google for leading me to it and not forking over 20 quid to unlock it from one of those UK sites.

A while back I started toying with playing back DVR-MS files from Media Center on Server 2003. For no particular reason really. Just thought it might be fun. I didn't bother going all the way through it since I didn't really see the point. Plus I was able to do it just fine with GraphEdit on Server if I really wanted. At any rate Jon (not TReKiE) decided that he wanted to be able to watch the files in Media Player on Server so with a little help from myself and Mark Salloway he's got a working Server install playing back his recordings. Here's the basic details:

"First, copy the following 3 files from the \Windows\System32 folder on your Windows XP machine to the \Windows\System32 folder on your Windows Server 2003 machine:
encdec.dll 6.05.2600.2180 sbe.dll 6.05.2600.2180 sbeio.dll 9.00.00.3165

Now run the following two commands from Start -> Run...:
regsvr32 encdec.dll regsvr32 sbe.dll

Next, load Windows Media Player (or any other media player, I presume), a .dvr-ms file, and enjoy!
Note: Like a regular Windows XP Home/Pro machine, in order to play .dvr-ms files, you will need a DVD decoder installed."

Here's a link to the actual posting from Jon.

So you're having problems with play back of various DVD's, XviD/DivX/3ivX, MPEG-2, and other video formats on your system. What's the issue? Well if you're new to the world of audio and video on computers lets start with the basics. Pretty much all audio and video you'll encounter will be compressed in some way. When you want to play an audio or video file on your system it passes through a codec (most commonly known as COmpression/DECompression, some shorten it to COder-DECoder, either way, same thing). The codec is what uncompresses the file so that your computer can process it further. It's actually pretty complex and I won't get into how it exactly works by drawing it out and providing an example using GraphEdit . As an example, even if a video you're trying to play has a file extension of AVI it could require a codec that isn't on your system. Despite another AVI file playing just fine.

Unfortunately Windows Media Player and Media Center don't quite do a good job at reporting what codec you need to download to play a file. As a case in point see one of the best WMP FAQ's out there. It's made by a guy at Microsoft named Zach, it's great resource for almost any WMP issue. Luckily, most file types are already handled but if you're like many people around the planet downloading videos of the net then most likely you'll need a couple that Microsoft doesn't ship with built in. Many sites and sources realizing this have tried to solve the problem by creating codec packs. While most of them have good intentions, often times they do more harm than good. The reason being is that you may already have the required items to play back the media and either don't realize it because it's hidden or it's not installed properly.

The most common issue I've seen is that a user has tried installing one of these codec packs on their system to play back a DivX video that was downloaded off of Kazaa, BitTorrent, WinMX, etc. Usually it's quite easy to see the codec packs in the same search results as the video's themselves making it all to easy to download and install something that won't help your experience. Some common ones are the K-Lite, Nimo, and ACE codec packs. No matter what it's called it's probably got some stuff in their you don't want and definitely don't want. Uninstalling the codec packs doesn't always work right either. Sometimes they'll register a filter/codec on the system and won't remove it correctly, leaving you with junk and videos unplayable.

The codec packs will also change your audio experience as well. Especially when it comes to AC3 (Dolby Digital) and other 5.1 content, like that found on DVD's. Often times codec packs will install a decoder that takes priority over the one you want and should be using. Of course sometimes it might just be that you've not gone into the Audio Properties and set your speaker set up to 5.1  (Control Panel - Sounds and Audio Devices - Advanced under Speaker settings).

What do you do then? Well my personal advice is to stay far away from codec packs. Don't install them, period. If you've downloaded a file and you can't seem to play it your best bet is to check and see what type of codecs you'll need to install to make it play. Once you've done that search for the name of the codec using Google or MSN Search, try and find the original creator of the codec and install that codec and that codec alone. Installing them one at a time make problems easier to track down and makes it easier to fix any issues it may cause.

Even then unless you're really digging through the trenches chances are you won't need more than 2 or 3 extra codecs to play most of the content out there.

Trying to determine what codec you should use? You can try out Marc Lion's (MVP) Sherlock Codec Detector or use GSpot.

XviD, DivX, 3ivX? I recommend using Koepi's "latest stable" decoder. There's also ffdshow if you're comfortable with something a bit more complex. Though if you go with ffdshow compatibility with MCE and some issues with WMP may come up now and again depending on usage and configuration.

DVD's, DTS, AC3 content, ideally you'll want to use either of the big 2. InterVideo WinDVD and CyberLink's PowerDVD, or maybe the possible third... nVidia's DVD solution whose name seems to change constantly, and whose status is up in the air. While it may work with players like Media Player Classic (not to be confused with Windows Media Player 6.4), ffdshow is also capable of playing back DVD's but doesn't work too well with WMP or MCE. Personally I'd recommend using WinDVD, it'll work in WMP, MCE, it'll convert your TV to WMV for syncing your Portable Media Center without issue. If you're having issues playing back DVD's or having issues with the sound not coming out of the speakers right most likely you've got something mixed up with multiple decoders. Microsoft has a tool that'll help you determine what's going on, the Windows XP Video Decoder Checkup Utility, is plain and simple. It'll show you what you have installed, what's preferred (setting preferred doesn't always work), and whether it's WMP, MCE, PMC compatible. If you have more than one decoder (not counting the one that is sometimes installed with Nero and the one that's installed by Sonic) you should try and track down the extra's and uninstall them. Also, those InterActual DVD's, watch for those, often times they'll install their own DVD decoder which makes things worse, I'd personally stay away from anything InterActual.

QuickTime, well, despite Apple's best effort you don't actually have to install it with iTunes (which does more than it should to your system, even if you don't want or own an iPod). You can find the QuickTime stand-alone installer if you look carefully enough at their main download page. Just uncheck the two boxes and don't bother with the email address when you click the button. Doing the Typical install for QuickTime usually doesn't do any harm to the system. You might want to pay attention to the MIME types during setup. Making sure to uncheck playback for all but QuickTime's own content. For a while I had issues where QuickTime would try and play back all my MIDI files on various websites. So keep an eye on that.

RealPlayer, ideally you wouldn't install this . But if you do try and make sure you turn off any of the phone home features, all the extra content, etc. Otherwise you'll get a player that tries to overstep it's boundaries and push itself onto you.

OGG Vorbis, FLAC, a good codec source that seems to work pretty well for me is the illiminable ogg directshow codecs release.

So that realistically covers most file types you'll find casually browsing various sites and P2P apps. Have a problem getting an audio or video file to play, not sure what codec you need, etc? Just ask in the comments, I'd be happy to answer any questions. Or take it to the microsoft.public.windows.mediacenter or microsoft.public.mediaplayer newsgroups where any number of users and MVP's can answer your questions.

Thanks to Alex Seigler and Dom for pointing me in the right direction on this one. Last night after Dom and I tried figuring out the inner workings of using ldifde and dsquery I ended up stumbling along and found KB842273. Which I then figured would work since Alex copied over some output which I've not got a clue how he pulled out still, dsquery maybe? At any rate my public folder store ended up getting the alias corey@ when I tried fooling with the default recipient policy. It looks like when I did that Exchange added a corey*@ to every place that had or could have an address. Anyway I just followed the blue bits and got things sorted.

1. Start the Active Directory Service Interface (ADSI) Edit tool. To do this, click Start, click Run, type adsiedit.msc in the Open box, and then click OK.
   Note ADSI Edit is included with the Microsoft Windows 2000 Server Support Tools and with the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Support Tools. To install the Windows 2000 Support Tools, double-click Setup.exe in the Support\Tools folder on the Windows 2000 CD. To install the Windows Server 2003 Support Tools, double-click Suptools.msi in the Support\Tools folder on the Windows Server 2003 CD.
2. Connect to a domain controller if you are not already connected.
3. Note In this step, "contoso.com" is a placeholder for your domain name, and the other italic words are also placeholders.
   Expand Configuration Container [computername.contoso.com], expand CN=Configuration,DC=contoso,DC=com, expand CN=Services, expand CN=Microsoft Exchange, expand CN=OrganizationName, expand CN=Administrative Groups, expand CN=AdministrativeGroupName, expand CN=Servers, expand CN=ExchangeServerName, expand CN=InformationStore, and then click CN=First Storage Group.
4. In the right pane, right-click CN=Public Folder Store (EXCHANGESERVERNAME), and then click Properties.
5. In the Select which properties to view list, click Both.
6. In the Select a property to view list, click proxyAddresses.
7. In the Value(s) box, determine whether an e-mail address is assigned. Typically, the public folder store is stamped with a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) address that appears similar to the following:
   SMTP:ExchangeServerName-IS@contoso.com (for me it had something similar to this plus SMTP:corey@auroravisions.com)
8. In the Select a property to view list, click mail.
9. In the Value(s) box, verify the SMTP address is the same as the SMTP address that is displayed in step 7.

Anyway, removing the somewhat hidden proxy address for the public folder store fixed things quite well. In Outlook all the mail that already came in as Public Folder Store (Server Name) still remains that way, but I think if I delete the .OST and let Outlook sync all over again from scratch that that might fix things in Outlook, not too sure about that one.

Oh and I'm still trying to figure out an easy way of migrating from a IIS NNTP file system store to an Exchange NNTP public folder store. I'm afraid if this doesn't actually get sorted soon I may switch back. Oh well.

UPDATE: Deleting the .OST and letting Outlook recreate it didn't change the previous emails which showed the To as Public Folder Store (Server Name). So I guess I'll just have to ignore those.