Some Notes on the Machines

Try this:

http://notes.ponderworthy.com/clean-up-all-system-and-user-profile-temp-folders

It may occur that this location:

%ProgramData%\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportQueue

(on most systems, thus:)

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportQueue

starts to fill with gigs and gigs of queued reports for Windows Error Reporting. The folder’s contents can be deleted safely. If you want to turn W.E.R. off on a server:

1. Go to Administrative Tools, Server Manager.
2. Go to the Server Manager top level page, the very bottom, make sure you can see the whole Resources and Support section.
3. Click into Configure Windows Error Reporting and turn it altogether off.

.NET frameworks can become corrupted. This page:

http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2005/04/08/406671.aspx

provides a tool which, even if the framework cannot be uninstalled, will remove all .NET frameworks and registry entries, and most thoroughly.

This is the solution to a problem with the newest QuickBooks, which is very .NET-dependent. The symptom is that it appears to start, and then stops, without error messages at all. In this case, remove .NET frameworks entirely using uninstall or the above tool, and then redownload and reinstall the .NET frameworks.

A reportedly excellent tool:

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/adwcleaner/

The first excellent tool for this is Toolbar Cop, no longer in development:

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/toolbarcop.htm

Here are methods to try:

"C:\Program Files\AskBarDis\unins000.exe" /SILENT

MsiExec.exe /X{86D4B82A-ABED-442A-BE86-96357B70F4FE} /qn

A great new toolset for tweaking and optimizing Windows:

http://www.mztweak.com/products.html

One item: the full-auto optimizations are not entirely enterprise-compatible, they disable terminal services, NetBIOS, DNS registration, and other essentials.

Here is another, by tweaking.com:

http://www.tweaking.com/content/page/simple_system_tweaker.html

Active Desktop — the background-is-a-web-page thing in 95 and 98 — is still there in XP, though mercifully it was deleted starting in Vista. To disable it, go here:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

create a DWORD of ForceActiveDesktopOn, set it to 0; and create a DWORD of NoActiveDesktop, set that to 1. Then reboot, and it’s done!

A whole lot of different fixes are here:

http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/shtdwnxp.php