Office 2010 SP1 Is Death For Access Developers

My talented wife started complaining last week that Microsoft Access started continually crashing trying to open databases after performing some design modification.

Some cursory debugging wasn’t providing consistent bugchecks, so rather than putting more effort into understanding the symptom I then looked for a cause. Design edits were working the week before the crashes so I then looked at updates. Office 2010 SP1 had been installed during that time, so I uninstalled SP1 and tried again. Bingo, database editing no longer resulted in Access crashes.

If Access databases are suddenly crashing on you for no reason, check to see if Office 2010 SP1 is installed.

UPDATE: Microsoft fixed this with a hotfix described in MSKB 2553385.

NVSPBind – A Command Line Utility For Managing Network Protocol Binding On Server Core Or Hyper-V Server Installs (About Time!)

I had a case a few months back where I’d determined that QoS was screwing over some network connectivity on a Server Core install. On a full install I’d simply use ncpl.cpl and remove the QoS Packet Scheduler binding from the adapter. Not so on the Core install. I had to resort to some registry hacking to disable the QoS Packet Scheduler to resolve my problem.

In my Inbox Zero efforts for my RSS feeds I came across this NVSPBind article on John Howard’s blog. Awesome! This will save some time in the future when enabling/disabling protocols.

Download links are here:

NVSPBind - http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/nvspbind

NVSPScrub - http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/nvspscrub

NVSPScrub helps restores your virtual networking configuration if you happen to screw it up with NVSPBind! :-)

Microsoft File Transfer Manager - Moving In-Progress Transfers to a New PC

When I migrated my SBS2003 box to SBS2008, I had a bunch of downloads queued up in Microsoft File Transfer Manager and the active transfer was a 10GB file that was more than halfway through. My monthly quota before shaping kicks in is 40GB, which is generally more than enough for what I do, but not so this time around.

I didn't really want to delay the migration nor did I want to have to re-download the file, so I looked at moving the in-progress trnasfer to another PC. Here's how I did it:

• Download Microsoft File Transfer Manager
• Install FTM, run it, enable updates and create a desktop shortcut
• Copy the files found at %USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Microsoft\File Transfer Manager from the old PC to the new PC
• Edit ftmTransferList.txt if your in-progress transfers are being moved to a different drive and folder path
• reference is URL encoded: %5C for \, %3A for :
• Copy your in-progress transfer files from the old PC to the new PC
• Export the registry settings found at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\SIAM\FileTransferManager\Settings from the old PC and merge on the new PC
• Run FTM from the desktop shortcut and resume the transfers

Customising the Error Message for IP Block List Providers in Exchange Server 2007

One of the things I did for blocklist error messages in Exchange Server 2003 was to provide the lookup URL for the affected IP address. This makes life easier for the other end when they try to diagnose why their mail wasn't delivered.

Microsoft's Knowledge Base article 823866 details how to go about doing this by using the variables %0, %1 and %2.

When I performed my SBS2003 to SBS2008 migration, I went to do customise the blocklist error messages, but found that %0, %1 and %2 don't work. After some mucking around I found that {0}, {1} and {2} work instead.

Here's the Powershell command I used to add a custom error message for lookups done against the Spamhaus list:

Add-IPBlockListProvider -Name zen.spamhaus.org -LookupDomain zen.spamhaus.org -AnyMatch $True -Enabled $True -RejectionResponse "{1} has blocked your IP address ({0}) using the list '{2}'. Please see http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip={0} for further information."

Fixing SBS 2003 RWW for Console Access From XP SP3, Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008

Sick of waiting for Microsoft to release a fix to RWW to enable Console access to SBS 2003 and any other Windows Server 2003 systems connected to your SBS network? So am I. So I’ve fixed it. Process is as follows:

Navigate to C:\Inetpub\Remote

Make a copy of tsweb.aspx

Open tsweb.aspx in your favorite editor (mine’s Notepad++)

Line 304 looks like this:

MsRdpClient.AdvancedSettings2.ConnectToServerConsole = console

 

Replace it with this:

version = MsRdpClient.Version
if strcomp(version,"6.0.6001") < 0 then
  MsRdpClient.AdvancedSettings2.ConnectToServerConsole = console
else
  MsRdpClient.AdvancedSettings2.ConnectToServerConsole = false
  MsRdpClient.AdvancedSettings6.ConnectToAdministerServer = console
end if

 

Save the changes. You can now establish console sessions to your SBS 2003 box and any other Windows Server 2003 boxes on your SBS network.

If anyone’s got a better way for displaying code in a Blogger page I’d be interested in knowing about it.

SBS 2008 RC1 Is Out

Microsoft have made SBS 2008 RC1 available via Public Preview. It can be downloaded from here.

Other useful links from the TechNet site:

Release Notes, Installation Guide, SBS Documentation, SBS Resources and the SBS 2008 Evaluation Centre.

 

Very handy documents to download and read:

Windows Small Business Server 2008 Installation Guide

Windows Small Business Server 2008 Console Help

Windows Small Business Server 2008 Migration Help

Migrating to Windows Small Business Server 2008 from Windows Small Business Server 2003

Migrating to Windows Small Business Server 2008 from Windows Small Business Server 2008

Windows Small Business Server 2008 Release Candidate Reviewer’s Guide

 

Three very useful resources to keep an eye on while evaluating and testing SBS 2008:

The Official SBS Blog

SBSfaq.com

Smallbizserver.Net

 

And finally, if you plan on testing this in a Virtual Machine, check out:

VMWare Settings for SBS 2008

Note that SBS 2008 requires 4GB of RAM. It won’t install with any less memory than this. You can use an evaluation of VMWare Workstation or either VMWare Server or VMWare Server 2.0 Release Candidate. Both VMWare Workstation and VMWare Server 2.0 Release Candidate support USB 2.0 devices, so you can test server backups/recovery with removable USB drives with these products.

Telstra Mobile Network - Network Time Problem and 2008 DST Changes

Today's been a weird day due to the fact that both my Nokia N95 and my wife's Nokia E51 rolled back from AEDT to AEST. I'm the only one that noticed it though.

In the past us Tasmanians would go to daylight savings times about 3 weeks ahead of our mainland counterparts that participated in daylight savings (South Australia, Victoria, ACT, New South Wales) and then change back at the same time.

Last year an agreement was reached for the states that participated in daylight savings (except Western Australia, who've introduced a DST trial for 3 years) to change to daylight savings on the last Sunday in October and change back on the first Sunday in April. The appropriate State departments promulgated their DST changes around March/April last year.

Thankfully organisations like Microsoft responded promptly with DST patches. Unfortunately, organisations like Nokia and Telstra ignored the changes and made no provision to cater for these changes.

I've just spent half an hour on the phone with Telstra explaining what the problem is and possible remediation steps to get the problem resolved. Apparently their mobile phone helpdesk has had an incredible spike in calls today, with the bulk of them about the DST change.

So the point of this post is if you're responsible for devices that require accurate time, or have their time synchronised, make yourself aware of local DST changes and plan for changes and also have contingency plans for when providers/suppliers are slack. If you're responsible for systems that span multiple timezones and/or countries, then you need to keep an eye on resources such as Microsoft's Hot Topics for Daylight Saving Time changes, which helps aggregate these changes into one resource.

I wonder how many people are going to be an hour late to work tomorrow?

Sophos Enterprise Console - Stuck on Connecting to Server

I have a problem on an SBS 2003 Premium Edition box (2 NICs and running ISA Server) where launching the Enterprise Console sits forever at the connection screen.



This is the same problem even if I perform a console-only install to a separate box.

The drastic remedy is to reboot the server. By using the console on a separate box I was able to use TCPView to find that EnterpriseConsole.exe was connecting to MgntSvc.exe on the server.

I then tried stopping the service from the command line:

> net stop "Sophos Management Service"

Which resulted in me being told that the service could not be stopped. I then used PsKill to stop the service:

> pskill "Sophos Management Service"

And I then restarted the service:

> net start "Sophos Management Service"

This then allowed me to successfully use the Enterprise Console.

Hyper-V Release Candidate is Here

Microsoft have made the Hyper-V Release Candidate available.

The Release Candidate has better (but not complete) localisation support, support for the x86 versions of Windows Server 2003 SMP, Vista SP1 and XP SP3, integration components for Vista SP1 and XP SP3 (yay!), and improved performance - especially with pass-though disk support.

It's looking good so far...

SBS2003 Remote Web Workplace, Console Access and That Awful /admin Change

OK, those of us that have worked with SBS2003 for quite some time tend to put Remote Web Workplace (RWW) right up there on our list of favourite SBS features.
The best feature I like is the pre-authenticated access to enable RDP proxy to the servers in the SBS network (although the use of port 4125 can be a pain behind some firewalls). The "Log on to or resume the console session of the remote computer" allows me to effectively remotely manage the server as though I was on site.

This is particularly useful when dealing with programs that require Session 0 - commonly known as console - access (for a concise description of terminal services history and session 0, see the Terminal Services Sessions: Then and Now article or the Wikipedia Terminal Services entry).
Over the last few months, I'd been finding that the Patch Tuesday reboots on the boxes I'd been RWW'ing to had resulted in hung systems, similar to what Susan Bradley's September 2006 blog entry records. Today, I saw the Ask the Performance Team's blog entry on The Reboot that Wasn't. This seemed to detail exactly what was going on with me, but I'd been enabling the "Log on to or resume the console session of the remote computer" option. So surely this wasn't my problem - or was it?
So I did some digging. I picked a Windows Vista RTM box, a Windows Vista SP1 box, a Windows Server 2003 SP2 box and a Windows Server 2008 box. I tried RWW'ing to my SBS 2003 box on each of them with the "Log on to or resume the console session of the remote computer" option set.
The results were as follows:

Windows Server 2003	Session 0
Windows Vista RTM	Session 0
Windows Vista SP1	Session 1
Windows Server 2008	Session 1

What's going on here? Shouldn't that be Session 0 for all those RWW clients?
No, not exactly. The problem we're seeing here is that the Remote Desktop Client (version 6.1) found in Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 has dropped the /console switch and replaced it with /admin. The description of this change can be found in MSKB 947723 and also at the following Terminal Services Team Blog entry (same entry as the KB article, but with user comments). This change also extends to the programmatic interfaces that RWW uses.
As I commented in the Terminal Services Team Blog entry, this change was unwarranted, as the /console switch could have been left alone and have the code handle graceful fallback from the security-enhanced console access in Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 to the Session 0 access in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
So, the Terminal Services team has broken console access from RWW. Doesn't say much for the QA process when an entire product feature that relies on the Remote Desktop Client isn't tested for regression.
So what can be done to mitigate this? Well, you can use something like CopSSH on the SBS box and ssh to it, then use an ssh tunnel to connect to the SBS box using RDP (a how-to guide can be found on this Remote Desktop and SSH page). Or you can allow direct RDP access to the SBS 2003 box, which is very useful if you're running the Premium Edition and using ISA Server as you can leverage the ISA Server lockdown mode - which means you get RDP access when ISA's in lockdown and you can also tighten up RDP access to a restricted set of computers when ISA's running normally. For Standard Edition, or non-ISA Premium Editions, RDP restriction should be done by your firewall device.
For a hardware solution, something like an iBoot remote power management device might be useful to help with those hang on shutdown problems.
Anyway, patching over RWW can be problematic - see the Repeat after me.... you don't patch over RWW blog entry and the Some months you can't patch over RWW blog entry for some reasons why patch over RWW is bad.

Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition - License Change Regarding Virtualisation

The introduction of Hyper-V to all editions of Windows Server 2008 (except Web Edition) has meant there's been a licensing change to the Standard Edition.

The previous editions of Windows Server Standard Edition allowed for 1 instance of Windows Server to be installed as a Physical Operating System Environment (POSE) or as a Virtual Operating System Environment (VOSE). This meant that if you wanted to host a virtualised Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition on say Virtual Server 2005 R2 running on Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition, then you needed to acquire 2 licenses of Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition - one for the physical instance and one for the virtual instance.

The new licensing change brings the Standard Edition in line with the Enterprise Edition. This means that Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition can be installed twice using the one license - once for the physical instance and once for the virtualised instance. The caveat is that the physical instance can only be used for the purposes of hosting the virtualised instance. All the workload for the Standard Edition license is to be performed in the virtualised instance, with the physical instance used to host and maintain the virtualised instance.

More information can be found in the Licensing Information section of the Hyper-V FAQ, Microsoft's Licensing Virtualisation changes and the Volume Licensing Product Use Rights.

Wisptis.exe Can Cause Browsing Problems

I went up to serverunleashed.com last week to have a look at Microsoft's marketing efforts for Windows Server 2008 launch.

On my freshly installed Windows Vista Business x64 with SP1 laptop, I was finding that Internet Explorer was locking up before getting to the loader progress bar (the one that appears on Vista and Server 2008 boot up).

I disabled all the add-ons (except Silverlight) to see if one of the add-ons was causing the problem. No go. My XP boxes were displaying it OK, as was my test Server 2003/2008 boxes and another Vista box.

One thing different with my laptop is that it has a Wacom Bamboo tablet. Which means that loads a heap of tablet-specific drivers and helper applications. I would find occasionally that when I launched Internet Explorer it would prompt me to run wisptis.exe, for which I always clicked Allow but never checked "Do not show me the warning for this program again". I thought this might be the problem, because when I force closed IE7 and selected "Look for a solution to this problem and restart Internet Explorer" it would restart IE and prompt to run wisptis.exe.

I went hunting for wisptis.exe and found that it's a pen input device utility that can be installed from a variety of sources, including being bundled with the OS. It's also useful in talking to the tablet digitisers, so removing it or not running it can impact on the usefulness of the tablet device.

Once I checked "Do not show me the warning for this program again" when prompted to run wisptis.exe and clicked Allow, then I was able to successfully view serverunleashed.com.

So if you're having Internet Explorer lock-ups when visiting a site and you've got tablet devices/drivers installed, this could be your problem.

SBS 2003 Media, Service Packs, Repair Install - Oh My!

This has been a long-running battle I've had with Microsoft over the years - the inability to either roll my own slipstreamed SBS media, or obtain slipstreamed SBS media at reasonable cost (like the Volume License media kits).

Why would I want to roll my own or access low-cost SBS media, you ask?

Well, if you ever have to do a Repair Install of your SBS box and you've added a Service Pack, you're hosed. The Repair Install will undo the service pack applied to the once-working box, and on reboot will give you a lovely blue screen. The only way around this is to restore from the last full backup, or re-image from your favorite imaging tool of choice (two listed below if you're not already using one).

Thanks to the wonderful advances of products like Acronis True Image and ShadowProtect, performing Repair Installs are a thing of the past, especially if you're using Repair Install to migrate a Retail SBS install to new hardware. The hardware independent restore capabilities of these products makes a full backup / minimal install / full restore / repair install redundant, as well as a lot slower.

But it's a pain if you don't have these, so make sure you have SBS media from the same channel (OEM, Retail or Volume License) with the Service Pack you're running already slipstreamed. Or simply don't install Windows Server 2003 Service Packs to SBS 2003 boxes.

Heroes Happen {2008} - Good News for Hobart and Darwin!

If you go up to the Heroes Happen {2008} site, you'll notice an absence of Hobart and Darwin in the list of venues.

Good news! Microsoft are going to do a Wave launch in Hobart and Darwin. It's going to be scaled down relative to the launches in the other capital cities, but this is certainly better than nothing at all.

The dates I've been provided with are:

8 April - Darwin

15 April - Hobart

Contact Microsoft Partner Services on 132058, option 4 to make sure you're added to the invite list for these events.

Details will be added to the Partner Portal in due course.

Recovering Public Folder Items Easily in Exchange Server 2003

I occasionally get requests from clients and colleagues asking me to recover Public Folder items from Exchange Server 2003.

Thankfully for me I performed the ultimate fubar while performing a test migration from NT4.0 + Exchange 5.5 to SBS 2003 Premium back when SBS 2003 first came out. That's right, I managed to blow away the majority of the Public Folder store in one fell swoop, simply because I wasn't following my own instructions properly and wasn't used to the new Exchange System Manager interface.

Thankfully, I had just been getting familiar with the new capabilities of Outlook Web Access and had used the Recover Deleted Items feature to get familiar with it and to be able to instruct clients on how to use it.

I didn't really want to have to spend the time re-copying the Public Folder store from the Exchange 5.5 install, so I looked for the Public Folder equivalent of the Recover Deleted Items feature for the mailbox. It appeared to be missing. Or was it?

I had noticed that the Recover Deleted Items window had essentially opened the Deleted Items folder in the mailbox and had set a URL variable. The variable and its setting was:

cmd=showdeleted

Being the lazy kind of guy I am - as well as being inquisitive - I thought I would give some link hacking a try. I opened up the Public Folders link, navigated to the parent folder of the folder I deleted, right-clicked on the parent folder and selected Open in new... This opened the folder in a new window. The URL of this folder was of the form:

https://server/public/Public%20Folder/?Cmd=contents

I then replaced contents with showdeleted. The URL then looked like:

https://server/public/Public%20Folder/?Cmd=showdeleted

Ta da! The folder I trashed was now visible and capable of being recovered, which saved me additional copying time. Sometimes screwing up a test environment is a great way to learn a new, lazy technique :-)

Microsoft Action Pack, New Assessment Criteria and New Special Edition Toolkits

As a Microsoft Registered Partner, I'm able to utilise the fantastic Microsoft Action Pack Subscription. This enables me to run my business on the same technologies I recommend to my clients, as well as evaluate and prepare for new and upcoming technologies. Combined with my TechNet Plus subscription, I'm able to evaluate a wide range of Microsoft technologies cost effectively. Virtualisation also enables me to test networks larger than my physical network.

Recently Microsoft introduced an assessment requirement to gain access to the Action Pack. This assessment requires partners to take an e-Learning course and then pass its associated assessment with a minimum score of 70%. This assessment must be passed every two years to receive uninterrupted Action Pack Subscription updates (see Eric Ligman's blog post on Action Pack Downgrade Rights for the best reason to not have your subscription lapse). The recommended courses are:

• Selling Microsoft Windows® Small Business Server 2003
  
• Implementing, Managing and Deploying Applications in Windows Server 2003
  
• Designing, Deploying and Managing a Network Solution for the Small and Medium-size Business
  
• Selling Microsoft Solutions to Small Business
  
• Implementing Microsoft Solution Accelerators for Small Business
  
• Introduction to Selling SQL Server 2005
  
• SQL Server 2005: Essentials for Sales Professionals
  
• Volume Licensing for Small and Medium Businesses
  
• Small Business Sales and Marketing Assessment (Small Business Specialist Requirement)

All but the Small Business Sales and Marketing Assessment (SBSMA) are Online Tutorials. The SBSMA is classed as an Assessment and as mentioned above is a pre-requisite to become a Small Business Specialist.

Microsoft also introduced two Special Edition Kits to the Action Pack. These are the Web Solutions Toolkit and the Small Business Specialist Toolkit. Both of these toolkits require additional assessment to be performed prior to issuance.

The Web Solutions Toolkit requires one of the following e-Learning courses to be passed with a minimum score of 70%

• Microsoft .NET Assessment
  
• Microsoft Expression Assessment
  
• Microsoft Office Live Developer Assessment

I completed the Microsoft Expression Assessment quite easily, as I had recently used Expression Web to build my Web site and have been playing with both the Expression Design and Blend CTPs over the last few months.

The Small Business Specialist Toolkit requires that you have completed the requirements to become a Small Business Specialist. The full details can be found here. The short form of this is:

• Become a Microsoft Partner
  
• Pass the Small Business Sales and Marketing Assessment
  
• Pass one of the following exams:
  
  • Microsoft Exam 70-282 - Designing, Deploying, and Managing a Network Solution for Small and Medium-Sized Business
    
  • Microsoft Exam 70-631 - Configuring Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
    
  • Microsoft Exam 74-134 - Pre-installing Microsoft Products Using the OEM Pre-installation Kit

Both of these Special Edition Kits will be refreshed biannually.
Another good reason to perform e-Learning and become certified!

Stopping Sophos PureMessage 3.0 from Generating an NDR Storm

I upgraded to the latest version of Sophos PureMessage (v2.6.1 upgrade to v3.0) on an SBS 2003 server.

The upgrade went smoothly as per usual. Hats off to Sophos for providing good quality products and excellent documentation.

This version now includes AD integration and allows for recipient validation. I enabled this, as well as verifying the upgraded settings. I kept an eye on progress for about 90 minutes as I was performing other administrative tasks.

When I came back to it the next morning, the server was being sluggish. Investigation showed that the were several thousand NDRs queued up, and further investigation revealed that the Exchange journal mailbox was bouncing Read Receipts with a Permission Denied error back to PureMessage. Unfortunately, the Read Receipts had no From header, so PureMessage was generating an NDR and trying to send it to an address of '<', which is a completely invalid address. This was then escalating an alert message to the Alert address, which had filled up the resulting mailbox. The mail bounce that was occuring was also generating an unscannable error due to too many nested attachments, which also queued up an alert message.

The remedial action was to remove the administrator alert address. This stopped the queuing. I then turned off administrator alerts for the On Unscannable action for the Exchange Store scanning and the Transport scanning. This helped stopped further NDR flooding.

The final action I performed that finally killed the NDR storm was to fire up the Exchange System Manager, go into the SmallBusiness SMTP Connector properties, go into Content Restrictions and turn off System Messages.

I also opened up the Delivery Restrictions placed on the mailbox that I'm using for Exchange Journalling until I can verify what the appropriate restrictions should be on the mailbox such that it works with PureMessage 3.0, seeing as the previous settings worked fine with PureMessage 2.6.1 (which was only accept messages from the Exchange Journalling mailbox).

Desperately Awaiting Windows Vista SP1 (or why Power Users should use Firefox)

IE7 under Windows Vista (and also under XP) is driving me nuts.

I frequently have 20-30 browser tabs open. These tabs generally contain my reading list and I place them in reading order. I also have a second IE7 window open for general searches and Webmail.

About once a fortnight I have IE7 crash on me. What really sucks is a lack of built-in IE7 crash recovery. For that I use IE7Pro. It does a reasonable job.

Sometimes the crash recovery just doesn't work all that well. When it doesn't work, I use TravelLog to pull out my URL history, then use FileParse (with XP compatability enabled) to reformat the output so I can quickly process the URL history in Excel.

This is obviously time consuming.

The final nail in the coffin for IE7 on Vista for me is that when I have 32+ tabs open I get a Denial of Service on Windows Explorer. Yes, that's right. When I exceed 32 tabs and go to the Start Menu and click on Computer, Explorer opens and then immediately closes. If I reduce the tabs to less than 32 I get Explorer functionality back.

This is a serious regression from Windows XP. Under XP I don't get this DoS. Under XP, it takes about 64 tabs for the interface to screw up, but this only affects IE7. Windows Explorer in XP still remains functional. The obvious indication of exceeding the capabilities in IE7 is that tabs fail to render content and also losing the ability to bring up right-click menus. This also occurs under Vista, but at a tab count of about 32 and with the added bonus of a Windows Explorer DoS.

So I'm now installing Firefox 2.0 and will be using this as my primary browser. This will improve my browsing efficiency and will stop my blood from boiling when IE7 crashes, or Explorer stops loading.

I really, really hope Vista SP1 fixes this.

Modifying SBS 2003 SP1's bkprunner.exe for Improved Backup Performance

I'll quickly jot this down before I forget.
I've recently been having a shrinking backup window on one of my client's SBS 2003 boxes. It backs up to tape and I didn't want to create a backup script and lose the nice reporting features that SBS provides. So I hacked the bkprunner.exe process instead :-)
On my own SBS 2003 box I was getting terrible server performance during my daily backup to USB drives. I found the undocumented /FU switch that was included with the SP1 version of ntbackup and some registry modifications that the Exchange team of Microsoft IT performed to improve their backup performance.

Open Explorer and go to "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Windows Small Business Server\Backup"
Make a copy of bkprunner.exe

Download and extract XVI32.
Run XVI32.exe
Open bkprunner.exe in XVI32

The address range $10F0-$11B7 is used for backups to .bkf files
The address range $11B8-$1277 is used for backups to tape

To turn off verify when backing up to a .bkf
Go to address $113A
In the hex pane (the middle one), type in the following hex values:
6E 00 6F 00 20
This enters in the text "no " in Unicode format.

To turn off buffered writes (as explained in MSKB 839272 and also here) when backing up to a .bkf - recommended
Go to address $115E
In the hex pane (the middle one), type in the following hex values:
46 00 55 00 20 00 20 00 20 00 20
This enters in the text "FU " in Unicode format.

To turn off verify when backing up to tape
Go to address $1202
In the hex pane (the middle one), type in the following hex values:
6E 00 6F 00 20
This enters in the text "no " in Unicode format.

Registry modifications for performance
Run regedit
Open HKEY_USERS
Load Hive
Open SBS Backup User's NTUSER.DAT registry hive; call the key name BACKUP
Browse to HKEY_USERS\BACKUP\Software\Microsoft\Ntbackup\Backup Engine.
Edit the value of the entry Logical Disk Buffer Size from 32 to 64.
Edit the value of the entry Max Buffer Size from 512 to 1024.
Edit the value of the entry Max Num Tape Buffers from 9 to 16.
If the above keys don't exist, create them as String values.
Click on HKEY_USERS\BACKUP
Unload hive

New Business Web Site

I finally upgraded the single page Melbourne IT-hosted site to a self hosted site for my business.
Because I'm a Microsoft registered partner and have access to the Microsoft Action Pack, I decided to see if I could build my own site using Expression Web. I used one of the corporate templates and was able to quickly build my site with my own content. I had installed Expression Web on my Vista laptop, so my initial design was only viewed using IE7.
I then proceeded to use Virtual PC to load up a Windows XP VM to test IE6 and I downloaded Firefox 2.0, the PortableApps version of Firefox 1.5, Opera 9.22 and Safari for Windows 3.0.3. The site displayed correctly under all these browsers! For someone who's used previous versions of FrontPage, I was fairly impressed to see consistent rendering across all browsers and proper handling of hand coding by the IDE (ie, by leaving it alone!).
It certainly took me less time to get the site up using the template and modifying it than hand coding it from scratch.
My final verification was to run the W3C Validator, the Validome Validator and the WDG Validator over the site. There were a couple of problems, but these were ones that I had introduced into the site. Microsoft's claim of "Built-in support for today's modern Web standards makes it easy to optimize your sites for accessibility and cross-browser compatibility" - while not rigorously tested by my effort - is backed up by the browsing consistency I saw as well as passing the three validators I used.