Tom Bennett

This post comes in two sections. The first is a description of the problem / general rant about it, and the second is how I fixed it. Hopefully they’re marked clearly enough so that people can skip ahead if they need to.

Problem / rant
A strange thing happened last night – I’d just configured my new Wii to connect to my wireless network, and was toying around with it’s email function (which is basic to say the least). I sent a couple of test emails to a friend of mine, and all seemed fine. That was until, having got bored with simple one-liners, he decided to reply with an entire copy of Kant’s ‘Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals’ as plain text in the body of the email (don’t ask why, I don’t know myself ). Despite only being 350k in total size (and the Wii’s maximum email limit being 1MB) it killed the console. And I mean, not just froze it, it properly broke it. Holding the power button down to reset it, and then turning it back on, took me to the black screen where you have to hit A (which I could do without any problems), and then to the channel screen. At this point you can move the cursor for approximately 1 second before everything freezes, the blue cd tray light flashes, and thats it.

A couple of hours online searching for people with similar problems dug up this forum. Needless to say, I wasn’t overly thrilled with the resolution put forward of sending the whole thing back to Nintendo for a complete replacement – can a single email really tank an entire console? I would hope not.

So after google didn’t seem to throw up any answers / suggestions, the next port of call was Nintendo’s own support pages and forums. One word for them. Rubbish.

My next step was to phone Nintendo on their customer support line (UK: 0870 6060 247 | website) – the 247 in the number gave me hope that even though it was 2am on a saturday night, I still be able to get technical support. Not the case, the opening times are 8.30 – 5.30pm, Mon – Fri. Grrr.

Solution
So here’s how I fixed it. Note, these steps worked for me for this particular issue and should be used as a guide only!

1. The Wii actually has a maintenance mode (which I found through this post, which allowed me to get into the channel screen without it freezing up. To access this, on the initial black loading screen (that asks you to push A) hold both the + and – buttons on your Wii controller and then push A. You should be greeted with a message telling you that you’ve entered maintenance mode.
2. Insert an SD card into you Wii, and copy across all of your saved games and channels (instructions can be found here
3. Transfer your Mii’s to your Wiimote through the Mii channel
4. Format the Wii system memory, instructions here

And voila, you should (or at least I did) have a fully working Wii again without having to send the entire thing back to Nintendo. All that’s left to do is copy back your saved games and mii’s from the SD card / controller.

On a side note, you may be able to delete the offending email message through the maintenance mode to save you the hassle of most of the steps. If you can, i’d appreciate it if someone could let me know, and I’ll update this post accordingly.

Bootnote: A lot of forums have suggested that unplugging the Wii and leaving for a duration of anywhere between 30 seconds and 10 minutes will reset it. I’ve found this not to be the case.

I’ve upgraded to Vista Business Edition on my Dell Latitude D420 last week, and I’ve only just noticed that my sound would cut out / stop / disable itself as soon as I unplugged my headphones. My speakers, which it should switch to automatically, didn’t click in. The sound came back on as soon as I popped the headphones back in. A few reboots later and still nothing. To get the sound back through the speakers, I had to unplug and replug the headphones about 5 or 6 times – not ideal.

Upgrading to the latest Sigmatel drivers from the Dell website seems to have done the trick. I wonder how many other default Vista drivers need upgrading before they work properly?

For the past few months, the flickr uploadr explorer shell extension has been crashing explorer.exe with

an unhandled win32 exception occurred in explorer.exe [2384]

message whenever I try to send two or more photos to it (a single photo seems to be fine).

I put up with it for a while, but then got fed up. I used ShellExView to disable all non-Microsoft shell extensions apart from the Flickr uploadr, and bingo, it was working again. Reenabling them one by one and testing, I found that the culprit is the excellent Notepad++ (i’m running version 3.8).

Maybe this is fixed in a future version of Notepad++, but until I’ve tested it I’ll keep the shell item disabled.

So, i’ve been experiencing the following error with exchange system manager

The operation completed successfully.
Facility: Win32
ID no: c0070000
Exchange System Manager

The error’s thrown when trying to expand the ‘Public Folders’ node in exchange system manager. Clicking ‘ok’ gets rid of the error and everything seems good and well until you restart ESM, where the same thing happens again.

Details for the server in question are

• Windows Server 2003 Enterprise SP1
• Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 SP2
• a recently installed Internet Explorer 7

Microsoft puts it down to the following:

a conflict between a newer version of the Psapi.dll file that Internet Explorer 7 uses and the older version that Exchange System Manager uses

Here’s the fix from Microsoft (knowledgebase link at the bottom):

1. Stop all Exchange and Internet Information Services (IIS) services.
a. Open the Services snap-in.
b. Stop the Microsoft Exchange System Attendant service.

Important Note the list of dependent services that will be stopped. For example, the list of dependent services may resemble the following:
• Microsoft Exchange Information Store
• Microsoft Exchange MTA Stacks

c. Stop the IIS Admin Service.

Important Note the list of dependent services that will be stopped. For example, the list of dependent services may resemble the following:
• World Wide Web Publishing Service
• Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)
• HTTP SSL
• AntigenIMC

2. Rename the Psapi.dll file. To do this, follow these steps:
a. Navigate to:
Drive_Letter:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\bin
b. Change the name of the Psapi.dll file to Psapi.dll.old.

3. Restart the Exchange services and the IIS services. This includes the dependent services that were stopped.

Further details can be found here:

• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932513
• http://www.petri.co.il/ie7_crashes_when_opening_esm_help.htm