I'm going to stop creating threads for every little thing, and I'll stick all of my problems in here

1. As a general query, why do I have to press ctrl+alt+delete to log in? Seems pointless...
2. Is there a known bug with file locks in Windows XP Professional? Espcecially on non-local locations
3. Where (if at all) can I find a list of bugs in Windows and their status?

Many thanks
Ben

1) Stops accounts getting locked by people accidentally typing away on keyboards (or sitting on them) and entering the wrong password too many times. Arguably it isn't really needed, but the office lethario is less likely to manage to sit on alt+crl+del on the secretaries keyboard, whilst chatting her up...

2) Not that I've seen. What exactly is the problem you are having? Although a lock can remain in place if a PC crashes / is removed from the network, without closing the files it has open. Given the stability of a good network and XP install, it is fairly rare these days.

3) Have a look at support.microsoft.com, their knowledgebase has a lot of information about Windows problems, although I don't think there is a list of all open bugs for all OSes and applications...

But you'd need to enter your username still. You'd need to accidently type someones username in then gain focus of the password field, then accidently type the wrong password...I understand it's "just one of those things", but it just seems bizaar.



I'm having problems within my own personal space where I create a new Word document (same happens with Notepad/Excel/powerPoint), save it and call it "file1", then edit the file, then do a save as and call it "file2". With file2 still open try renaming file1, you can't because it's still open, except it's not, file2 is...
Also we are having a huge amount of problems where in the shared area we are unable to move/delete/rename files because the system claims the file is open elsewhere, but in many cases we can be sure that no one has it open...

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I may pay a visit there at some point, I know OpenSolaris has a public bugster interface, I doubted that MS would have the same, but was wondering as it may be useful if they did...

Cheers Dave

Not necessarily, the default in XP is to display a list of user accounts, with account icons. You can change it to not display the list, but displays the last logged in user and places the cursor in the password box, or you can set it to not list the last user and place the cursor in the user box. On top of this, you can elect to make the user press alt+ctrl+del.


Hmm, I believe older versions of office did keep files open, even after they were closed - shouldn't affect notepad though... Quitting the application will release all locks. It is probably something legacy related, going back to Windows 3.1...


As MS products are, generally, not open source, there isn't a publicly available bug database, because there are no external developers who need access to it. The difference between a closed source based applicaiton and an open source project.

I've found quitting the app to work nicely, however it's slow to load again, it's just a bit of a pain...

As a sysadmin, I would say that if Word takes more than 1-2 seconds to re-load, then your machine is totally f****d!

We have old Pentium 4 machines, with 512MB RAM, here with Office 2003 and they can reload Excel or Word in a couple of seconds.

Wow. Well, my machine has an Intel C2D 2392MHz CPU and 992MB RAM, it's running Windows XP Pro SP2 and it has Office 2003.

Since I started up this morning Word has been open, I just closed it now. I have two IE6 windows open (Google Reader and this page) and two Explorer windows open (two network locations).
I'll click the Word icon in my quick launch panel now.........OK, 23 seconds until Word is up and I'm able to type anything...
I'll do it again, closed. Clicking now.......Slightly faster at 16 seconds now...

I've asked tech support about the speed, I've been told that this is expected and acceptable speeds

It is an expected and acceptable speed for a Pentium III running at under 1Ghz, with 256MB RAM...

And IE6? It is a security nightmare and no longer has security patch support!

Sounds like a bunch of cowboys.

The problem is, the organisation got rid of most of the in-house IT people and outsourced the whole IT side of things. The company who we outsourced to just seem rubbish to be honest, everything takes twice as long as the IT company can't always make the desisions themselves, they have to go up and back into the organisation, they have conflicting securaty policies such as: "You MUST NOT write down your password", followed in another point "You may write your password down and place it in an envelope marked 'restricted'", now anyone internally has privilages to look at anything marked restrictid, so it's not much of a security feature...
If we want new software or anything it has to go through a compatibility process, costing the requesting department a few hundered thousand pounds and some stupidly long wait (6-8 months if memory serves).

As you can imagine, I left MS software four years ago with a dislike to the platform, comming back here and using the software properly really hasn't done much to persuade me to use MS software in the future.

Same here. Oh how we love CSC. Developping on standard PCs, with fudges to avoid the lock-downs. And IE6. Wahooooooooo!

Edd

On my Cyrix 233 with 32MB ram, Word takes up to 20 seconds to open the first time you boot. It then takes less than 0.5 seconds to open subsequently, presumably because it's cached. It's pretty much instant.

Your PC is probably 50x faster, has 30x the memory and presumably a newer hard disk, so I would expect it to be faster.

The primary cause of massive delays is badly implemented anti-virus software. I bet if you turned off whatever you're using, the whole machine would feel massively faster. Have a look at your process CPU utilisation which may reveal were the fault lies.

Surprisingly, CPU utilisation is very low! I think it may have been configured to do everything over the network, and the network or server just won't handle everyone...Oddly around 6pm things like Word speed up...

Why doesn't the find and replace dialog in the Excel Macro editor use the same regex as Word? And for that matter, why doesn't Word use standard Regex?

Not commenting about that specific example but you need to remember that most if not all of the office products originally came from separate companies. If you look at the VBA collections inthem they are totally different its a complete mare...........

More importantly why does the Find & Replace differ between how it searches if you have multiple cells selected when searching a worksheet compared to the whole workbook??? That's what's been annoying me of late!