StevenWhiting.com

Have used before. It’s very good and free.

https://www.nucleustechnologies.com/ost-viewer.html

UPDATE – I’ve changed the Amazon links to point to the Smile charity Amazon links instead so I don’t get anything but a charity will. More info about Smile Amazon here https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=202035970

Sorry about the adverts. I needed to put them on to try and fund the site. Feel free to put an adblock on if you wish. I’d rather you didn’t as would help with the hosting fees (which have gone up) but I understand if you wish to disable them.

If you’d like to donate, I’d be grateful 🙂

PayPal Donation. Fanks :o)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sysinternals-suite

The nice people at my hosting helped me fixed this, Krystal. As I thought it might be an issue at their end but turns out it wasn’t. Most other providers wouldn’t of bothered fixing this as it was my issue, not theirs.

It was a rogue plugin. Rename the plugin folder on your WordPress via FTP or Cpanel. Then you should be able to get into admin. Rename plugin back to what it was which should bring back all plugins but they will be disabled. Then turn them on, one by one, till you find the one causing the issue.

Bad Behaviour was the one causing this. I note it hasn’t been update for months and not tested with the version of WordPress I’m on so I’ve left it disabled.

Run CMD as admin and just type as follows

REG ADD “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome” /v IncognitoModeAvailability /t REG_DWORD /d 00000002

Other interesting reg settings

https://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3

uninstall-adddomaincontroller -lastdomaincontrollerindomain -removeapplicationpartitions

This will still fail if you have the box ticked in AD that protects the object from deletion.

Another old one from the XP days and I believe this was Outlook 2010.

Two users would kept getting this Outlook popup every few minutes. Very helpful message “A program”. Would be good if it could report what program had invoked it.

So I fire up Process Monitor and take a trace. Once I stop the capture I take a look. I assume it’s a not registry issue so I filter all reg entries out.

You can quickly do this by just clicking the registry icon

This now filters out all the reg entries in the trace.

I then filter out just Outlook to see if there is anything obvious and see these entries.

I pick the first TCP entry and press CTRL+B to bookmark it. I then go and turn the Outlook filter off so all other entries reappear. I do this to see what is going on around that time other than Outlook and I bookmark it in case I lose my place.

This reveals the app that appears to be invoking this and causing the popup

The piece of Crapita (sorry I mean Capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capita) software appears to be reference the Outlook Object Library and then I see Outlook trying to connect to the exchange server. These all correspond with the pop-up. Speaking to the person who supported the Crapita app they discovered there was an issue on the server that was causing CapitaEVForms to do this. Once disabled the message stopped.

It appears if an external app attempts to invoke Outlook without permission or as in this case, access the address book without being “Trusted” then Outlook pops up a warning in case the access was malicious.

This is an old case from XP days, back in 2011. And a perfect example of David Soloman’s saying “Check Process Explorer AND Process Monitor”. It’s possible the cause will show in one but not the other as happened in this incident.

We had several users that would try to access network shares and then Explorer would hang for minutes. Eventually populating all the files that were on the share and giving the user access. This wasn’t always happening so when it did, instead of giving me time to troubleshoot I was ordered “Just rebuild the machine”.

Annoying. That isn’t fixing the issue, it’s just delaying it until it happens again. It was deemed quicker than finding out what was causing the issue. I disagreed. Having kit sat on the shelf waiting to be swapped out was all fine and good, but it still wasted their time. As they had to login to a new machine, set other settings up, wait for updates if the standby machine hadn’t been update recently etc.

The only troubleshooting I’d been given time to do was using Process Explorer. I could see Explorer running at 50% every time the issue happened. But why?

FINALLY, the day came where my manager had the issue and she was going on leave for 2 weeks. “Alright, use my laptop to see what you can find”.

Did you read that? Laptop, that was a key, all the users affected were on laptops. Hmm.

So when a process starts its made up of threads and stacks. So although it looks like “Explorer” is running at 50% and Task Manager showed this, Task Manager won’t show you the threads of stacks. I was able to reliably recreate the issue, finally so ran Process Monitor. Nothing. Just filtering Explorer at the time didn’t show anything obvious.

So I turned back to Process Explorer. Let’s look at the threads. Bingo.

A .dll that isn’t explorer.exe is running within the thread and it’s actually that .dll that is running at 50% NOT explorer.exe as crappy Task Manager shows. This is why Task Manager, even in Windows 10, is pretty useless.

PGP. That is familiar. That’s are encryption software we use on the laptops. We see this by clicking Module which takes you to the .dll’s properties.

So is this .dll important? We can’t not encrypt the laptops. Maybe there’s a patch. Despite it showing as PGP Corporation, Symantec had already bought them out at that point. So I did a Google search. And we find this

https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH149635.html

It states there are rare issues where this .dll can cause an issue and the work around is to unregister the .dll

Is that safe? Yes, all the thing did was search network drives for files that had been encrypted with PGP so it can then change the icon to show it’s encrypted. Pointless!

So any user that then ran into the issue I’d connect to their machine, run CMD as admin, then run the unregister command

regsvr32 /u PGPfsshl.dll

And that’s it. Explorer would no longer hang for minutes and the user could carrying on with their work. All within 5mins. 5mins compared to swapping out their laptop with a replacement. And that is why it is helpful to give your engineers time to find the cause of a problem and then a solution or work around. As most often, that can be a quicker fix that just a rebuild.