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I’ve been getting this error more and more on my XP machines lately.

Runtime Error!
Program: C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.exe

This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way.
Please contact the application's support team for more information.

Apple’s software in particular has been giving me this problem. I found this thread which simply states to update itunes with software update:
http://forums.techguy.org/multimedia/581031-itunes-runtime-error.html

That’s good for the constant itunes crash, which was happening every time I opened the application. One thing that sucks is that this FORCES you to upgrade iTunes, and ‘upgrades’ have been generally more and more restrictive downgrades with iTunes lately. (Wonder if this was partly intentional on Apple’s part.)

What this doesn’t solve though is why it keeps happening with other applications. What library is getting corrupted I wonder? Why does it happen sporadically with firefox and safari as well on two of my different XP machines?

Every once in a while Firefox starts on the wrong screen, and every new window I open also starts on the wrong screen, even when I quit and restart firefox. It drives me nuts.

I try using the ultramon button that switches the maximized window to the other screen, closing, and then restarting firefox, but new instances of the window still open on the new screen.

I figure out the solution to this every once in a while and then forget and it drives me nuts, so I’m writing it down here. You have to restore firefox to a resizable window, drag it over to the other screen, and then maximize from there. The problem is firefox doesn’t remember that you switched screens when you use the ultramon function, but does remember if you click and drag (which is handled by windows) the window over.

Ok now I think it’s flash that’s bogging down my system, still trying to figure it out…

I was wrong! Weeks after uninstalling Adblock Plus I was still getting system unresponsiveness and firefox at 50% CPU. I uninstalled google toolbar after reading a post elsewhere and my computer seems to bee snappy again. I reinstalled Adblock Plus and it’s working great.
Too bad I miss google toolbar. My firefox search box uses google for most things, but I miss pagerank and the single word buttons that appear generated by your searches for instant finds. Anyone have another plugin for that I can use?

I love Adblock Plus, and I miss it. There was such a feeling of power when I right clicked on an ad and blocked it forever. And the pre-installed list of hideous ads were great.
But my computer became unusable. Firefox was taking up 50% CPU any time I simply refocused a window or loaded a page. Other elements of Windows stopped responding. I could hardly get any work done.
I tried deleting my pluginreg.dat file, reinstalling firefox, all sorts of things. Sometimes when watching my memory watcher, StatusbarEx, the used memory would increase, meg by meg, by about one meg a second. Finally disabling Adblock Plus solved my woes.
RIP Adblock plus!

I got three security alerts from windows firewall booting up my machine this morning, about phonenumberregistry.exe, bluetoothdispatcher.exe, and rendezvous.exe. Worried, I googled them, and found one match that said they were related to the Nokia series 40 SDK. Which I just installed yesterday. Whew.

If you haven’t installed an SDK and are getting these errors, maybe be a little more worried. I guess this should be a lesson in naming your services with non-scary names (like phone number registry, jeez.) (I guess malware hackers do this for the most part anyway.)

On a side note, what the hell is wrong with windows firewall? I mean I’ll get these notices about outgoing connections, which is great, and the options to “keep blocking” or “unblock”, but while this dialog is displaying, windows is already allowing the program to communicate back and forth. What’s the point of that? I’ve played whole half life 2 games and then came back to the desktop where it says “windows firewall is blocking (half life 2). Should it continue blocking this program?” And I want to sarcastically say, “yeah, great job, windows.” But I hit unblock in case it actually ever starts to do anything.

First of all, you shouldn’t be using internet explorer. I hope you know why. IE was vulnerable for 284 days in 2006 alone, compared to Firefox which was vulnerable for 9 days. By using IE you’re exposing yourself to all sorts of vulnerabilities, including adware, spyware, and viruses, simply by browsing unsafe sites. Most of the sites you go to may be safe, but even large sites like myspace had adware bugs last year. In addition, there are tons of sites out there that infect your computer when you just type the wrong URL, such as googkle.com (link goes to security warning, not googkle.com).

Now, if you’re on a mac, you may complain that firefox is too much of a hog, it’s too slow for you. And I’d agree with you. Use Safari, or Opera, or something, just not IE.

Now that I’m at a job with a PC again, I’ve been discovering the joys of firefox. I love the live bookmark feeds–I’m subscribed to digg, fark, slashdot, make zine, woot, nytimes, the onion, and craigslist. I use a bookmarks’ full titles add-on that shows me wider (more) titles per feed, albeit still not all of them.

I also enjoy using firebug, a javascript debugger, though I disabled it when the version I used conflicted with digg commenting.

Finally, I just discovered adblock, an extension that lets me simply right click on any image and block it forever, or even any image from the source site. Goodbye horrible shaking, flashing ads! Blocking flash ads is a little harder, but you can hit control-shift-F to disable all flash on a page, and control-shift-A to list all blockable elements on a page, including the flash ads that you hate.

I’ve been waiting for a feature like this for a long time. Finally it’s here! That plus yahoo mail beta may convert me to using Firefox even on the mac.

Additional Tip

One thing I miss from the mac is the ability to retain sessions even when all windows are closed. On macs, you can close all windows and the application will remain open, meaning in the case of browsers, you can close all windows and then still open a new one, go to yahoo mail again, and still be logged in.

My solution is to always keep a firefox window open on my least used desktop, desktop 4, using the wonderfully awesome and free Virtual Dimension desktop manager. As long as the window remains open on desktop 4, desktops 1-3 can have all their firefox windows closed and I’ll still keep my multiple mail sessions.

Virtual Dimension deserves its own article, but I’ll briefly mention how it’s improved my life–you can configure hotkeys to switch between desktops, and have unlimited desktops, with a different wallpaper on each one. It’s multi monitor compatible, and combined with ultramon, a commercial app I use that extends the taskbar onto a second monitor, I can easily switch applications from desktop to desktop or monitor to monitor, and switch between them easily. I have desktop 1 devoted to work – eclipse on monitor 1, SQLyog on monitor 2; desktop 2 devoted to email and music – outlook on monitor 1, itunes on monitor 2; virtualization and remote desktops to desktop 3 – timbuktu to my mac on monitor 1 and VMware and Ubuntu on fullscreen on monitor 2; and procrastination and websurfing on desktop 4 – the always open browser to retain my sessions, additional web email, digg, etc.

Now I’m working on getting drempels, my favorite free visualization app, to work on multiple monitors.

Switching to a PC for my new job, I miss the volume keys on the mac for when I’m listening to music with headphones. “I bet I can find a utility that assigns a shortcut key to the plus and minus keys on the number pad,” I thought. I tried one utility, but the beep it made was deafening, and editing the wav file that came with the application didn’t help. Time to do more googling.

Enter Volumouse. Holy crap, this thing’s better than a shortcut key. You control the volume with a modifyer key (or click) and the scroll wheel. I have it (default) assigned to control the system volume when I hold down alt and scroll or hold down left click and scroll. This thing is awesome!
via Lifehacker (which is also awesome).

So someone asks you to play some music, and you click on the perfect itunes songs and iTunes says it can’t find the file. It helpfully puts a little exclamation point next to the mp3 and tells you it can’t find the file, but then doesn’t let you do anything else with it. Do you want to search for it? No. You want it to play music. You don’t want to ‘consolidate library’ because you like where your mp3s are and you don’t want apple managing everything you do. You can’t click on the exclamation point column to sort by ghost links, and you can’t find them all and delete them. What do you do?

For mac, you use Super Find Dead Tracks. It’s an applescript that gets rid of those exclamation point files. You put it in home > library > iTunes > Scripts . If Scripts doesn’t exist you create it. Then it appears as a menu item in a new script icon folder:

Then you wait a little bit and it gives you a dialog when it’s finished. Then you give the guy money or link to him on your blog (thanks dude).

If you’re on PC, you use Itunes Library Updater 2.0.

How I found this / Realized it was a Problem
First I talked to Maeve (my g/f) if she knew the best way to do this. She thought about it and would consolidate her library manually by searching for mp3s, dragging them to the itunes folder, deleting the library and rebuilding it from scratch. This is not a bad idea, it’s taking control of your library and not leaving it up to apple to organize your music. That way you know what you have and if you’ve missed any mp3s. I just wondered if this was a slower way to do it; looking online later people have said having apple reimport all your music can take hours.

On a side note, I think Maeve is less lazy than I am–I would have a computer clean my room and navigate me around if it could. She is generally better at organizing files, and rates her music, meaning iTunes is going to reward her for the manual effort she puts into her library. I on the other hand think about iTune’s lack of functionality, and think “this is stupid” and “there has to be a way to do this.” Generally speaking with computers, if you think these things, chances are you’re right, lots of people think this and have come up with ways of fixing it. It’s a competitive market, so if there’s something the program is really lacking, chances are the competing software does what you’re thinking of and you may be using the wrong program.
Anyway, first I googled “itunes consolidate library not found” (without quotes), which are two literal phrases from itunes error messages. I didn’t know what to call this concept (broken links? ghost files? empty references?) so I tried using language found in the errors and features itunes gives you: the menu item “Advanced > Consolidate Library”, and “The Original Song File Could Not Be Found.” My attempt was to tell google I’m looking for an advanced feature of iTunes relating to organizing my library (like “consolidate library”) but that I’m having a problem “not found”. With this phrase, I found a document called “iTunes Problems (Quarter Life Crisis).” This article wasn’t too helpful and neither were my search engine results pages, but on that page I did find someone who referred to these items in my problem as “lost links”. I tried a new google search for “itunes broken links” thinking I’d get better results. I did, the first link was a digg article that linked to a PC app that addressed the problem.

Being on a mac, I wasn’t done yet, though I have a PC so that app will be helpful in the future. The digg comments and the article mention apple scripts that can do the same thing, but don’t link to it. So on the mac I know there’s an apple script out there that will fix this. Going back to the same search engine results page (SERP) I click on the second link which describes my problem. This person calls the broken files “ghosts”. Addendum–for some reason experts exchange now is hiding the solution from me and trying to charge me to view it–but when I went to this page before, I saw the solution and found two scripts pages that both had very helpful looking itunes scripts, one of which had the super find dead tracks app I needed.
Why am I explaining what I googled? While lots of people have already figured this out, and it doesn’t take a genius to know how to use google, I do see people not knowing how to use google well. They’ll ask me computer questions that they could easily google the answer for. This is an explanation of how to do it in a more general sense. I’m also interested in the problem solving process and what it can teach us about solving other problems. I think if we had more people writing about their problems, describing how they thought about them, posting the solutions, and tagging their solution with other keywords people could use to find them, we could evolve and learn faster as a group than we can by ourselves with the whole ‘figure it out for yourself’ mentality. Anyone want to comment or join in? If you have a problem you’d like to write about solving please email me at jordan at designtion.com.

I’m getting lots of errors with mcafee personal firewall. I get this on boot:

An error has occured in the script on this page.

Line: 944
Char: 3
Error: Object doesn’t support this property or method:
‘m_objSubMgr.GetSubInfo’
Code: 0
URL: mcp://C:\PROGRA~1\McAfee.com\Agent\RegWizUl.dll:default.htm

Do you want to continue running scripts on this page?

I read on this page that I should try running regsvr32 scrrun.dll and try installing Windows Script 5.6 for Windows XP and Windows 2000, but I’m still having problems.

Dreamweaver and other apps are having javscript problems as well. Still unsolved. More later.

—
Update: This is a common issue for mcafee, which has a page about it here. They have you run a batch file that is supposed to fix internet explorer registry and scripting issues. Unfortunately it still did not fix my problem.

So after three virus scans, AVG Free was able to detect the virus wreaking havoc on my computer.

Thanks to this forum on hardwareanalysis.com for helping me solve this problem. Those guys really are experts on XP and have helped me with two very complicated issues for free.
Norton Antivirus didn’t detect this virus and in fact was disabled by it; Trend Micro’s Housecall did not pick it up, and even AVG Antivirus’ Trial Edition didn’t find it! After a full scan with AVG Trial edition, I uninstalled it after hearing about the Free edition, and the free edition detected it immediately!

The error I got was:

“You have a virus!
backdoor.generic2.vlu
C:\System Volume Information\restore_1\lsass.exe
Ignore | Info | Move to Vault | Restore access”

Lsass.exe is a legit process to be running, but only if there’s one copy and it’s in c:\windows\system32. Mine was in System Volume Information, which is impossible to access because it is where XP keeps its restore points. AVG’s undocumented ‘restore access’ button opens up XP’s System Restore preference pane, which allows you to turn off system restore, which (for better or for worse) deletes all system restore points. Doing this fixed my computer.

So the repair install was unnecessary and did not fix my computer, and it’s amazing that norton, trend micro and AVG’s pay edition could not pick up this virus. I guess the best things in life really are free!

Here is the letter I wrote to AVG.

My Windows XP Machine is acting fishy. I installed the google pack, a software package that includes google desktop, firefox, google earth, picasa, and norton antivirus, and things have started going wrong with norton antivirus.

I also installed google pack on a different PC and had the same thing happen. First Norton has an error like “Norton encountered an internal error and needs to close. Please reinstall norton antivirus.”

I also get the error when opening word documents or running the symantec autofix tool: “Norton Does not support the repair feature. Please reinstall norton antivirus.”

Then, programs will start to fail. After being left idle for about 15 minutes, the internet will fail. Launching programs will give you a file not found error. Rebooting fixes the problem.

On my main PC, I tried several times uninstalling norton antivirus and google pack. Norton still persists, giving me several errors including the amusing “this program was installed with [cobrandedpackagename]. Please uninstall [cobrandedpackagename] as well.” (Brackets included in the error message.) Now it says “The installation is missing the file instopts.dat. Setup will now exit. For more information, please visit wwww.symantec.com/install” [sic].

I’ve done an online virus scan with trendmicro housecall, which didn’t find much. Programs like mcaffee internet security and personal firewall are also not working now, and their uninstalls failed.

Certain run commands do not work anymore, such as cmd.exe and compmgmt.msc. Browsing to their location and double clicking does not work either. I get the error “Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the file.”
I read here that nconvert.exe can generate this error for cmd.exe if it does not have the right permissions. However, I can’t find this file.

My user accounts window was completely blank, until I read here that running “regsvr32 jscript.dll” will solve this issue.

However, now that I can access user accounts, it looks like my account is completely normal, administrator with all rights.

I guess my next step is to find my hard drive device driver and do a repair install of windows.

–Update-

I read that the sircam worm can corrupt rundll and .exe files, especially if you try to repair it with symantec norton, but their removal tool scaned my machine and couldn’t find it.
I didn’t want to run a system restore because I’d uninstalled antivirus programs and was afraid this would give me all sorts of errors (it has in the past). So I dug up my SCSI/ultra ATA hard drive drivers and did a repair install of windows.

47 updates later, it looks like I’m running smoothly again. I think I’ll try mcaffee instead of norton.

I may have had more luck fiddling with permissions before doing the reinstall. I didn’t try these but it looks as though there are some fixes on this page:

http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_tweaks.htm

It also had a replacement cmd.exe that worked for me when my system was acting up. It’s a useful resource.

Even though my computer’s normal again I’ll leave this as unsolved because I don’t know what caused the problem.