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The man had hiccups.

I’ve tried innumerable sticky note programs and always seem to return to the one I’ve used for yonks – Stickies from Zhorn Software. . . . Look no further

Website: http://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/stickies/

Download: http://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/stickies/stickies_setup_8.0c.exe

Cheers, Chris

I second Chris’s recommendation. I’ve been using this program since at least Windows 98 or 2000 (or 95?), and the author keeps adding amazing features, like being able to make a specific sticky note appear only when a specific program window is open — I use this to remind me of things in that particular program or situation. I could go on and on about the features, but briefly this is a very stable little program that allows you to control how you want your stickies to act, incl. many options for scheduling reminders. Yet with the amazing features, the interface is clean and simple, using a left click on the tray icon to start a new Stickie and a right-click context menu for other options. I use it constantly.

Edit: Be sure to reboot after installing; it may not tell you to do so, but Help will not run properly unless you do.

It might be a good idea to start a new thread to be sure your question is seen. In the meantime….

What have you checked and ruled out? Have you tried the suggestions in this thread, including restarting with add-ons disabled (via Help menu) and/or creating a new profile? You could create a new profile and send some test messages to see if the speed issue is resolved. If your mail takes a large amount of disk space, that could be slowing things down, as well. Did it start suddenly? Could it be related to your thumb drive (old, going bad, or full), i.e., is this true with other thumb drives?

Heh. Now you know why it wasn’t my first suggestion. It’s not a quick and easy fix for those of us who have used Firefox and/or Thunderbird for years. It’s time-consuming to create a new profile and then reinstall the various add-ons, and then make sure the settings and any databases for those add-ons are also copied over — all without messing up the new profile. But if it resolves a problem, then ultimately we can say it was worth it — at least once memory of the stress fades a bit. :rolleyes:

Thanks for coming back to let us know. I’m glad to hear it worked for you.

Well, you could always try the solution I was left with when I couldn’t fix a Firefox problem I was having. I ended up creating a brand-new profile, not a reinstallation of the program but a new profile, which creates a new set of user settings. From there, with Thunderbird, you would then install any add-ons, etc. Then copy over just your mail folder and subfolders from your original profile, assuming the new profile acts the way it’s supposed to.

Edited to Add: Sometimes it’s the profile itself that has somehow become corrupted. This solution works for both Firefox and Thunderbird in those situations.

Have you explored the Mozillazine.org site for possible answers? They have a forum and a pretty complete knowledge base. From there I note that one common source of such problems comes from, predictably enough, add-ons/extensions/themes. As with Firefox, try starting it in safe mode (without your add-ons) to see if the problem remains, or disable all of them to see. If that resolves the problem, then re-enable one by one to find the one causing the problem. If the problem still occurs in safe mode, then try some more research in the knowledge base there or try the forum, where there are a lot of expert users who could help you.

Note: Mozillazine is a user-run forum, not an official Mozilla site. You could try searching the Mozilla site, as well, for additional answers.

My business XP Pro — yes, another case of how prohibitively expensive and difficult it would be to replace the specialized software — is on the ESR (Extended Support Release) channel for Firefox, created for business/enterprise situations. There is an overview of ESR here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/ Essentially, they focus on stable releases addressing primarily security issues, rather than on the latest and greatest features.

You can find the latest ESR version here, which is a single installation file: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/31.2.0esr/win32/en-US/ — found by scrolling down through all of the listings on the main releases page (ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/) to the last ESR listing. Once you’ve installed an ESR release, then Firefox will automatically look only for ESR releases in the future.

My Win7 runs the “normal” Firefox, which often requires some fiddling (and/or add-ons) to deal with the newest look they’ve adopted. My XP just plugs along nicely with the stable ESR updates. :rolleyes:

…You are clearly insufficiently experienced in medieval warfare in Europe….

Thanks for my good laugh of the day, BATcher!

Roland,

Yes, I would start a new thread with your question, so others will notice and respond to your specific question.

I am unaware of any specific setting in Emsisoft that tells it to strip out bad or questionable files from a zip file instead of quarantining the entire archive, though I would be interested in others’ experience with that; it’s quite possible that it does that on its own in some cases without any user setting. I have no experience with Avast.

MA

I’ve used AZZCardfile for years and like it a lot. I name the “cards” using the word(s) I think I might use when looking for it so that when the program starts I just type the word(s) of what I’m looking for, and the list is immediately narrowed to those cards. Easy to use — you can format text, insert pics, links, whatever. It’s customizable, so I’ve set it up to look and act the way I prefer. Good choice!

ETA: I can’t speak to your specific needs, in terms of moving your spreadsheet info. to it, but it’s a fast and solid database program where I keep a lot of data. It’s certainly worth testing it to see if it will act the way you hope. Just take some time configuring it to your preferences.

Thanks, Sudo. I’ll keep that in mind going forward. I have successfully used restore points before, but doing so in Safe Mode is something I hadn’t thought of.

Once OA crashed, my priority was to uninstall it, so I didn’t take the time to see if it behaved in Safe Mode. If this were a spare computer, now that the mental rust is largely off, it would have been interesting to solve this Gordian knot, but as it is, my priority was to get it up and running again. (I did play a word game following all of this, and blew the roof off of prior scores, so this turned out to be good for my brain. :D)

Do you get requests to authorize such programs when you try to run them?

Your question has stuck with me. You meant the Task Manager, Sysinternals Process Explorer, and the ilk? No, no requests for authorization as with other programs, just nothing happening or erroring out, Learning Mode or not.

I’m now looking at PrivateFirewall as a possibility for my XP; Gizmo’s 2014 review gave it 5 stars, and I think I’ll take a closer look. If not, then ZoneAlarm (not free); both have HIPS. I’m liking the EAM, so that plus MBAM Premium, MBAE, etc. from there. EMET 4 is already running on it, even with Vipre.

Do you get requests to authorize such programs when you try to run them?

I was running it mostly in Learning Mode but had it alert me — I saw various programs flash by, one of which was one of the three I had stopped from auto-starting; others went by pretty fast while I was focusing on system functions, which still weren’t up to par, though I went in and reviewed the allowed list periodically. I don’t believe Task Manager ever showed up, nor did Process Explorer. But I really am done with OA this time.

I was unable to restore the System Restore Point I had created prior to the install; it errored out. I ran sfc and chkdsk /f (no errors except for minor in free space), then tried restoring it again, just in case, but no go. So apparently (irony alert) OA fired a parting shot as I bid farewell. :D:

I think things are okay; the restore point is probably not critical, as things once again seem to be working well, and I always have my Macrium Reflect images and daily data/user backups.

I am reevaluating the best path forward with the business XP — minus OA, which could install okay on it, but I’m not even going to try it. I know that things are much more complex, with much over my head now, but I’ve never had such disastrous results with installing and setting up programs from the 1980s forward, including firewalls, and this is a mainstream laptop (2011 Lenovo).

Well, I did my 4th OA install tonight. After further research on ixfxtray.exe, ixgxpers.com, and hkcmd.exe, I decided to go ahead and remove them from auto-starting. I even went ahead and uninstalled EMET 5.0, after exporting my settings.

I then installed OA again. At the outset I excluded some folders including my beloved Classic Shell/Explorer and ShellFolderFix, plus Logitech SetPoint, which were all problems before. Then rebooted to finish the install process and began excluding others, incl. Realtek Audio, and the AV/AM stuff like EAM and MBAE; I even excluded the on-demand MBAM and SAS. All this while I had Learning Mode running and kept it on as I added more folders (Macrium Reflect, etc. — anything I had read about that was known to cause problems with OA), and then began trying to run various programs. During this, I rebooted yet again, with Learning Mode still going, then shut it off after a bit.

I did balk at excluding Windowssystem32, where some of the “problem” files reside, along with little things like Task Manager, etc. Why have a firewall if I have to exclude everything?

Windows seemed to be a bit more stable this time, though I found I still could not run Task Manager or Sysinternals Process Explorer and was worried about other such things I hadn’t yet tried to run. I was still getting some periodic WerFault errors, but I thought perhaps I could try to get it to a point that was stable enough to handle remote support.

Then OA froze — with no Task Manager available. I have again uninstalled OA.

OA may be a great firewall, in spite of the testing results last spring, but this has been over the top. I’ve reinstalled EMET 5 and will reboot a couple more times, check the registry, possibly do a System Restore just to be sure, if anything looks funny. My travels with OA are at the end of the road; I don’t need anything that cranky — I can do cranky on my own.