Posts

Posted on

WMP11 DLL Problems

I came across a funny thing this morning that just about drove me crazy. I was trying to test for a live webcast and for some reason I couldn’t see the picture via the web. I tried about a dozen things, eventually I got it running with VLC but a webcast isn’t much of one if it isn’t on a webpage.

Then I tried one of the other computers in the house and had no issues whatsoever.

I’m still not sure what the problem was, but it has something to do with Vista and WMP11 I think. I did however come upon the solution.

regsvr32 C:\WINDOWS\system32\wmnetmgr.dll

If you run this via Start->Run or a command prompt it will again register the Windows Media Net Manager DLL. Apparently now and then there is some registry corruption which could cause problems and this little piece of code re-adds all the information and reloads the needed DLL.

I’m not sure on the specifics honestly but I did find this article on re-registering DLLs.

Posted on

Security Snafu

Sometimes a good intentioned security practice can go horribly wrong. The company my wife works had a training session on some new material in a new system. To start training everyone’s password was reset with an eleven character temporary password. Upon logging in users were met with a simple screen asking them to change their password to one of their liking.

It was your typical password change form. One box on the top for your old password and then two below for the new one. But as everyone tried to change their password they were meant with error after error.

My girlfriend was smart enough to count the stars in the password field. Whoever had come up with the magic eleven number had apparently forgotten that the change password form only takes ten characters. With no way to continue and nobody around to fix the problem she and all of her co-workers spent a good part of the day filling out various packets with ‘could not view training material.’

And now, as a result of these overbearing and poorly implemented security protocols, everyone’s password is stuck on the same temporary one until someone who can count can fix it.