I keep getting this weird error after my Windows session has been logged in for a long time. It happens if I try to run any Office program (Excel, Outlook, Word, etc.) or if I try to run Windows Media Player.

Logging off and logging back in fixes the problem, but that’s hardly ideal.

I found a forum post regarding the issue, and it seems that Microsoft is indeed aware of the issue:

In the meantime: You don't need to reboot, just log off and log back on. It's a per-user issue. That will clear it up if it's the same issue.  I realize it can be a pain and I'm not trying to minimze the issue at all, but the workaround is simpler/quicker than a full reboot.

It hits different people in different time frames. It depends on how many apps you are running and how often you have loaded/unloaded them.

I appologize that it takes this long, but we'd rather not give you an update that had other problems/regressions, so we want to make sure it's fully tested, and that can take a few weeks in an environment as complex as this, as I'm sure you know. 

Reading further, it seems the fix is actually finally released, but won’t be forced upon users (via Windows Update) until July. If you’re having this problem, you can download KB952709 and fix it right now!

Since getting my console back after having it repaired, due to the red ring of death problem, I haven't played it much. I decided today to sit down and play Assassin's Creed, and about five minutes into it, my screen starts to look posterized. Basically, it looks like the colors are reduced. Think cheesy 80's music video special effects. Here's some shots:

Of course, if I go to XBox.com and look up my repair information, it says I'm out of warranty. Fantastic. A console I hardly play is broken yet again. I'm going to try to call and deal with their customer service people (in India.. ugh.) But I doubt I will be able to get them to fix this for free.

I haven't found any other information online about this problem. I can't be the only one, though.

Stuff I've tried:

- Changing from 1080p to 1080i, 720p, etc. -- no change.

- Jiggling the entire cable, in case there's a short.

- Unplugging/re-plugging in the video cable.

- Performing the "Reset Video Settings" trick per Microsoft's KB article.

How *$()@% frustrating is this? Microsoft really doesn't get it sometimes.

Update: According to users who replied to my XBox.com forum post, the problem appears to be that the GPU is either overheating, or beginning to break away from the motherboard. This is similar to what causes the "Red Ring of Death" errors, but not the same. I think I'm going to just have to bite the bullet and pay for repairs, even though this is clearly a design flaw, and not a problem I caused.

I’ve been having really infrequent “random” blue screens/freezes ever since I got my new computer back in July. I finally tracked the cause to either be high disk I/O or high network I/O. I replaced my network card with a PCI-E Intel gigabit card, but that didn’t solve the problem. I was in Visual Studio the other day, and went to get latest on a project, and boom, blue screen.

It sometimes isn’t just a big blue screen of death, though. Other times it just freezes my entire operating system for 15–20 seconds, then it “catches up” with itself.

Looking at my Windows event log, I see a lot of entries like this:

Source: nvstor32
Event ID: 129
Level: Warning
Message: Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort0, was issued.

These messages seem to indicate a problem with my nVidia-based SATA chipset. Searching around “the Google”, I find other users in similiar situations. They all suggest turning off Native Command Queing (NCQ) in the nVidia drive controller’s properties:

I’ve done that now and rebooted, and it seems to have fixed the problem. Funny enough, under XP (on this same machine) I have never had the random lockups or event log entries, so it appears to be a Vista-specific problem.

So, who’s to blame? Is it nVidia? I’m running the latest nForce drivers for my chipset (nVidia 650i SLI MCP), which at the time of this blog entry is 15.08. Is it Microsoft’s fault? Are they doing something funky in the newer drive code that could be causing this?

Who knows. All I know is that I have to disable a potentially performance-helping feature in order to not crash my machine. Maybe Scott Hanselman’s run into this on his very similiar quad core rig? Oh well. That’s technology for you. As long as it’s not corrupting my data, I guess.

I was trying to open a project from SourceSafe under the new Visual Studio 2008, and my list of SourceSafe servers was blank. After a few moments of frustration, I found a CTP (beta) release of a pack of fixes for SourceSafe, and Microsoft suggests you install it before using Visual SourceSafe 2005 in Visual Studio 2008.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=FAF41EDD-924D-449F-AEFC-9C86DD499720&displaylang=en

The CTP seems to have fixed my problem, as I can now open VSS2005 projects from VS2008.

I was using my favorite audio player/manager, MediaMonkey, this afternoon and ran into a really annoying bug. All of the songs in a particular album would play except for one. MediaMonkey would just skip the file, no error or anything.

At first I thought the file was “corrupt”, but it couldn’t be. It had only been ripped a few weeks ago, and plays fine in other players, such as Winamp, VLC and Foobar2000. I started to think logically about the problem, and noticed that particular track had parenthesis in it’s filename. I removed the parathesis, and replaced them with another character. Nope, still skipping.

So I thought more, and concluded that the filename was the longest filename on the album. I removed a few characters and tried again. Voila, now it works!

I do some research and find that MediaMonkey (at least the new beta for Vista) uses the Quicktime API to playback AAC files. I decided to try an experiment, and attempted to load the troublesome file (with it’s long filename) into Quicktime via Quicktime’s own “open file” menu. It’s leads me to a wonderfully unhelpful error message of “Error -37: a bad filename or volume name was encountered”. Oh, really?

Doing even further research, it seems that Quicktime can’t handle a file with a name longer than 60 characters. What the crap?

Searching around the web, I find a handful of people who have run into this same problem. Why hasn’t this been fixed yet? Is this why iTunes automatically stores most songs in a “cut off filename” state when “Keep my iTunes Folder Organized” is checked?

Ugh. Will someone at Apple get their head outta their butt, fire the entire Quicktime/iTunes for Windows development staff, and start over? I’m tired of it crashing, having exploits, making my computer slow to a crawl, and not playing back “HD” content on even screaming-fast PCs. All major reasons I switched to MediaMonkey. But alas, since MediaMonkey relies on Quicktime for it’s AAC playback, I’m going to have to truncate all my AAC filenames until a fix comes out.