It has been about a week since I have installed Vista and I have some updates and more comments. Only a few days ago it was still a toss up to whether or not I was going to reinstall Windows XP. Then I was slightly more in favor of XP. Now it is still a toss up but the advantage has gone to Vista for staying. I have become a little bit more familiar with the system and some of my personal habits have changed so it is not as dreadful as it once was.

CAN NOT CHANGE ATTRIBUTES FROM READ ONLY

I have managed to move this to the resolved category. The knowledge base article at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/326549 does a good job at describing the problem. Basically Vista and XP both set the read-only attribute on folders and I went back to a XP machine to verify this. When in the context of a folder, read-only means nothing and is only a signal to the OS that the folder customization should be shown (i.e. those annoying .ini files that makes your Pictures folder show thumbnails and not straight file listings). While the default folder behavior is the same, the default file behavior is not. Vista will by default put a read-only attribute on all files where XP did not and this is the root cause of my problem.

I tested this and found that when removing the read-only attribute from a folder, all read-only file attributes were cleared. The drive that I was having this particular problem came from my previous system so the owner of all the files was the old XP account so I also took ownership of the files. In the end the problem has been solved even though I consider it poor communication on Microsoft’s part.

Here is in-depth explanation of what I done.
1. Right click the folder in question and select properties.
2. Click the security tab.
3. Click Advanced
4. Click Edit
5. Using the permissions dialogues, set USERS and any other applicable accounts to Full Control.
6. Delete the old XP account which is a Windows SSID.
7. Uncheck Inherit from parent
8. Check Replace permissions
9. Acknowledge all open dialogue boxes and wait for the permissions to be set. I had an entire hard drive to set so it took a few hours.

This is a sad tale of a man and his machine that would not start again. The story continues with a sorted affair between two operating systems and a battle to win the love of this man�s heart.

My problems began last weekend when I started my computer after it had been off from the previous night. Everything went normally throughout the POST but once Windows XP started I heard the dreaded clicking from the hard drive. After several reboots and a Spinrite diagnostic I gave up and called the time of death around three in the afternoon. This is not all bad because I had the drive fully backed up with no loss of data. Actually this may be an opportunity to try something new.

A few months back I purchased an MSDN subscription from Microsoft and I had access to all of the latest operating systems, including Vista. This would be an excellent time to start fresh and try out Vista at the same time. After all, Vista has been on market for well over a year and I have never had the opportunity to introduce myself. This should be fun.

EDITORS NOTE: Anywhere you see a bold statement at the beginning of a paragraph; I would appreciate help if you have a solution to this particular problem. Now, on to the story.

After I installed a new Seagate hard drive to replace the broken Western Digital (WD), I quickly dove into the Windows Vista install process. Everything went great and I was surprised at how fast and clean the process went since I had never installed Vista before. After the installation was complete and the machine rebooted for the last time, I was also impressed at the boot speed. Everything appeared to be fantastic.

I logged on for the first time and I have to say that I was impressed. Vista really does look good. My first annoyance was the start menu and no icons on the desktop. I soon remedied that problem by switching almost everything to the classic view. It took a few minutes to discover all of the new hiding places for settings but I managed as most of the control panel structure follows XP’s lead.

IE STOPS RESPONDING ALL THE TIME

And then the first problem hit me straight in the noise. Internet Explorer starts half the time and stops responding after opening the other half. On a brand new install with no programs loaded this was a real irritation. Of course when this happens, you can’t just close the window, it takes a minute for it to respond and then ask if it should be restarted. In that same amount of time I could have already killed the process and opened a new window myself. Also for some reason it takes 10 seconds for the window to finally shut. It looks like this is certainly one thing they should have gotten right. I ended up downloading FireFox just to get on the Internet.

WHERE IS MY UP ARROW?

My next battle started during the mass software installation phase. To be quite honest I have my fair share of programs that I don’t always use frequently but when I need them I need them. This phase can take almost a day in itself. I noticed that of course the Windows Explorer had changed but I didn’t notice the missing up arrow or the go to parent directory button. XP has always had the back arrow but I never used it because I know where I am in the directory structure and shortcuts can break where you want to go. For instance, you follow a shortcut to My Documents and then want to go to the Users folder, just hit the up arrow. But now it is missing.

UNABLE TO KILL PROCESSES

After messing with Vista for about a day I started having application problems (besides of course IE which is still not working at this point). Apparently a few of my XP programs do not like to play nice with Vista. The main offenders are FireFox, plink (party of the Putty suite for SSH), and eMule. I have heard that power user don’t especially like Vista but before I started I chalked this up to just unfamiliarity of the operating system. After all a new operating system plays by different rules and it take some time to learn the rules. A new user, even a seasoned veteran, can get frustrated by not being able to do things as quickly as they did before. This next problem just made my head split open and a little demon pop out. I am normally a very quite person but I let out a loud verbal obscenity that all the neighbors could hear.

FireFox had stopped working so I quickly opened up Task Manager and killed the process. The problem was that the process would not die! WTF? I tried several more times with no luck. I tried to restart FireFox and it would not open because another process by the same name was already open. It is understandable that the programmers behind FireFox wouldn’t want two process open at the same time but what happens when you can’t get rid of the first one? Perhaps this was a onetime bug and I restarted the computer. It came back up and I quickly downloaded Process Explorer from SysInternals. After a few minutes, sure enough FireFox had frozen again and I went to Process Explorer this time and had the same result. I then opened an Administrator command prompt and nothing once again happened. I restarted once again and started searching the web. I still haven’t found a definitive answer but some of Microsoft’s own posts suggest that this is the way Vista works and you have to live with it.

Same song different verse. I opened plink in a command window and connected to one of my SSH servers. Now I love plink because it gets the job done and all I have to do is launch a batch file to get a fairly complication connection started. To be fair it has always been buggy and would crash under XP, sometimes very unexpectedly. I would simply start the session again and keep SSHing away. Near the end of my application reload I needed some files from the SSH server so I started the batch file and started happily downloading. After around 30 minutes, plink crapped out on me but as usually I was not surprised. I double clicked on the batch file to reestablish the connection but nothing happened. Now this is odd. I opened Task Manager (I should have learned my lesson by now shouldn’t I) and saw that plink was still running. Please refer to the above paragraph because it was like a bad dream that kept coming back. This time I had another nasty surprise; apparently the entire networking stack was also involved/crashed and I had no network connectivity. WTF! Restart the computer and repeat.

Some song different verse. I opened eMule and started downloading a few “applications.” eMule crashed and guess what? I couldn’t kill the process. After experiencing this “feature” one too many times, I think Microsoft is STUPID for making this change. Now I will have to admit that the system never crashed during any of these application crashes and the GUI remained responsive at all times, which is the ultimate goal of any operating system, but what use is this if you have to restart the entire machine just because one application has crashed? After all I am the Administrator and I should have enough brain power when to decide to kill a process. So what if I want to kill a process? I may not have a good reason. Perhaps it looked at me wrong and I shoot the little SOB. It is still my box and I demand control over my own machine, otherwise I will have to restart every 45 minutes.

CAN NOT CHANGE ATTRIBUTES FROM READ ONLY

This is another what were they thinking? Apparently all of the folders on your hard drive are set to read only. I found out about this little nugget of goodness when I attached a removable hard drive to my machine and tried to change some files on it. It is not unusual for the operating system to set the files and folders to read only but I can’t permanently change the attributes. I open the properties to change the attributes and the UAC prompt pops up. I say yes and then remove the read only attribute. I close the property window, reopen it and the !@#$ thing is still read only!

UAC

This actually isn’t a problem. I commend Microsoft on this change and I gladly accept the extra feedback from the operating system. Now only if moving or deleting items from the start menu wasn’t a protected operation.

SHUTDOWN PROGRAMS

Sometimes you have a program that needs to run right before Windows shuts down. Interestingly enough this is a common operation and Microsoft has (apparently in the past) made API hooks and calls built into Windows to allow such things to work. What I am talking about is a wiping program that will clear your recycle bin, temp folders, and Internet Explorer cache before the machine is shutdown. It just so happens that I have found a great one that works wonderfully under XP but doesn’t exactly like Vista. The problem is that when the wiping is under way just before Windows Vista logs off the user, Vista detects it as a hung program and tries to kill the process. This is of course not what you want to happen and quickly leads to a BSOD. The next time you start the machine, Vista has done you a favor and removed the application from the shutdown order, grrrrrr.

What puzzles me is that there is a well known time during shutdown that a program can request to remain open. The program will send an API command to Windows saying, yes I know you want to shut down but give me a few more moments, I will tell you when I am done. Under XP this works as expected with the wiping utility but Vista apparently ignores this request. I am happy to say that I have a wide smile on my face every time this happens and I am looking at a BSOD. Blue really does bring out the color of my eyes.

CONCLUSION

If you have made it this far then I commend you and hopefully you had a small laugh at my expense. It is always fun to laugh at others. In all honestly if you have any suggestions to the above problems that I am having please let me know. I have already given up on this install and I will be starting from scratch once I get some pressing work done. Perhaps I will take it much slower next time and isolate some of the problems. If that doesn’t work then I am going back to Windows XP and perhaps never install Vista again. I really like Vista, it is beautiful, and just a fast as XP. Apparently the down side is that Microsoft thinks every user has had half their brain removed due to a lobotomy or horrific car crash. If I decide that I want to kill a process then damn it I should be able to.

I would seriously love to continue this conversation but it is getting hard to see the screen. eMule has crashed once again and is covering up half of the Microsoft Word document that I am typing in. IE is also crashed and I can see its outline behind this window also. Have fun while I restart once again (looks at watch, yep it’s been about 45 minutes).