Replies

Thank you all that replied. To answer in sequence…
Leif: I stopped my anti-stuff programs (Norton Internet Security and ThreatFile), but it made no difference. The shut down process got as far as the “Shutting Down” screen and froze.
Al: I tried PsShutdown.exe. Much to my surprise it did nothing. Well, a dos screen flashed on screen for one tenth of a second, and that was it.
Paul: I’m just starting to look at the 33 gadgets on that screen. Thanks.

John

The problem of the taskbar locked on my right hand screen has gone away. During the process of applying the Windows Vista SP1 update, and then upgrading from Vista Home Premium to Vista Ultimate, the problem, whatever it was, was fixed. The taskbar was easily moved back to the primary screen.

John

The 1401 was one of the first IBM computers from the early ’60s. It was the first one to start replacing machines using peg boards.

Thanks again,
John

How can someone with 45 years experience (prior to the 1401) be so dense? Of course there is a Project->Add windows form. Thanks for a kick in the right direction.

John

Changed the statuement as per your instructions.

Worked perfectly.

Thank you, John

Sounds good; thanks again,

John

Kevin,
Thank you again for your help. Your last sencence “I suppose it would depend on when the config file is read and if the settings inside it can be refreshed.” makes sense. What I am going to pursue is another direction. As this is a function of Debug, would it not make sense that an .exe version of the program would work?

John

Kevin,
Thank you for jumping in. I followed your instructions to unckeck ContextSwitchDeadlock, and ZipBackup and my invoking code ran to completion. Just because I followed your instructions does not mean that I knew what I was doing. Therefore, two more questions please:
1. Is the unckecking of ContextSwitchDeadlock something that I should undo (recheck) later for other reasons?
2. Does your sentence “It can also be deactivated via the app. config.” mean that it can be unckecked and rechecked via VB code? If so, please show me how.

Thank you for your time and information,
John

Charlotte,
The “Shell” is to ZipBackup a popular file ziping program. It is part of my archiving system that organizes and stores daily backups, each 300GB in size, for the previous three weeks. It has always taken this long, but, as it was invoked manually, this was no problem. It is only now that I am making it part of a VB archiving system that it is causing a problem. It was also timing out when I was previously copying all the files directly from within VB code. Switching to ZipBackup was an attempt to do it all faster.

John

That does sound reasonable. But with the directory structure of Vista’s internal Backup and Restore Center application, that would be a huge undertaking as every single directory would have to be identified, created and populated one at a time. Even so, why on earth would the Directory class provide a Move method (more dangerous that Copy), and not a Copy method?

John

Thank you for your advise,

John

For replies received from Andrew, Don and Rory, I thank you. I will investigate all suggestions.

And yes, Rory, I do mean XP. When your first IBM PC was the XT, it kinda’ gets ingrained.

John

Joe and John,
Thank you, I will study your recommendations.

John

The drive in question is a Maxtor OneTouch (it doesn’t appear to have an independent model number), 120GB, partitioned evenly into drives F, G, and H which I’ve been using for about three years. When I moved them to the Vista PC, I did not install their accompanying driver (I read that they are only needed for the OneTouch backup feature which I’ve never used). Your interest in the drive particulars reminded me of the driver’s existence, so I tried to install it. The install program locks up before getting started. (A Vista thing?)

So now I don’t know if I have a Vista problem or a drive problem. Is Vista supposed to do this? (Remember, all my recent testing of the situation has been done with plain old Windows Notepad.exe . It still cannot write to the external drive when invoked normally.) If you suspect a drive querk, please recommend a simple external drive and I’ll go out and buy it. Is there any other information that I can supply?

Thanks for your time and ideas,

John Littell

Dave,
I noticed this problem with a program called ZipBackup that I’m attempting to use to create backups on an external drive. I then tested the extent of the problem with plain old Windows Notepad. It is unable, unless specifically “run as administrator” from the context menu, to write anything to an external drive.

I tried to follow your instructions to set its properties, but when I selected the Compatibility tab, everything on it, including the check box you mentioned, was grayed out. At the top was said that nothing on this tab could be changed as the program is part of Windows.

Assuming this situation is sorted out, does this mean that I’ve got to go into the properties of every single program on the PC and change it??

Some additional information: Word and Excel cannot write to my external drive either. The error window says
Header: Save As
Body: You don’t have permission to save in this location.
Contact the administrator to obtain permission.

I’m not doing anything strange. I can plug the drive back into XP and write with no problem. And, I also have not problem writing to an external flash drive. Your thoughts please. This cannot be right.

John