Slow blogger

I realize that I’ve been really slow about blogging lately, so I’ll try to give a quick update and then give some more detailed posts soon!  I’ve also given in to Twitter (@seancolyer ) if interested.

It’s my last semester and I’ve been really busy between finishing projects (and my thesis!), trying to enjoy Charlottesville before I leave, and trying to travel a bit and visit friends from other schools. I’ve taken a job in northern Virginia working with a small software consulting startup. The team seems like a really good group, and I’m excited about the opportunity.  I don’t start working until August, which leaves me some time to do some interesting stuff, notably an epic cross country road trip that I will discuss in future posts..

Foxfield. Those within the UVA community immediately have a preconceived notion of the word.  Foxfield Races are horse races that draw a huge portion of students together for a day of socializing. The event has become a signature of Greek organizations around grounds. The emphasis is on socializing more than horse racing, the running joke has become whether spectators even see horses (the course is large enough it’s possible and in fact often true). Presumably from the association with horse racing, Foxfield has also become well known for people wearing their southern Sunday bests; but this often just results in varying levels of seersucker and crazy pastel color combinations. I went for the first time this year, I figured I should partake in the UVA event once in my four years here.

Anticipation surrounding the races were significantly dampened with the prediction of thunderstorms all day. However, the rain held off for virtually the entire day, with the worst rain before most people even arrived.  Additionally, the weather provided a bit of an advantage over some other years where the temperatures often shoot quite high which combining with sun can be quite uncomfortable (I’m told). I had a good time, it was a unique experience and I happened to run into a surprising number of people I didn’t expect to see.

Keep your eyes peeled for new posts..

HOWTO: Fix Windows 7 Profiles (desktop icons not load) 2

My desktop machine (Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit x64) recently stopped loading icons when I logged in. The start menu and and everything seemed to work except my Desktop.  After scouring the web there seemed to be a few proposed solutions:

  1. System Restore
  2. Explorer isn’t running/ registry WinLogon or userinit.exe isn’t properly set
  3. Too large files on Desktop (I can’t find this link now, but most of these are in multiple places)
  4. Create New User and import data from the old profile

These weren’t good for me.  System Restore is never ideal, it’s just rolling back to before you made some unknown mistake, and you’ll probably lose stuff on the way. Explorer was running and userinit.exe was running.

I was also tipped off that this was an issue with a local user profile because I had another user account that was loading fine. I didn’t want to create a new user and import data because there are lots of settings and things attached to this account, it also just seems like a messy way to fix this.

How I fixed it, in the registry:

HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion/Winlogon set FirstLogon to 1

rename HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows to HKCU/Software/Microsoft/WindowsOLD or something like that

Log out and log back in.  This will create most of a clean explorer/windows profile.  The one issue left is preferences don’t seem to save properly (file associations, taskbar, etc…)

The way I fixed this was to export HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer from a clean profile.  Log back in to your original profile.  You have to delete HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer in your registry; As far as I can tell you can’t edit these values regardless of permissions, but it will let you delete the whole directory (Nice one MS). Then import the version you exported previously, log out and log back in.

You will lose a few things — generally settings in Explorer (file preferences, themes, etc..) unfortunately.  I didn’t really feel like chasing down specifically which values got corrupted in mine, but if you were to look within the Windows registry folder addressed above and fiddle it could probably be found without too much effort — I was fine with basically reseting my explorer profile.

Hope this helps someone, if something I said is unclear feel free to ask for clarification.