Category: Windows Server

Does not print or prints strange characters when using Terminal Server/RDP Easy Print service

We recently upgraded to Windows 2008 R2 terminal services/RDP and started getting reports from Windows XP users that they could not print and were getting error messages or were getting strange characters being printed when using the new Easy Print service.

Easy Print uses the local printer drivers rather than requiring the drivers to be installed on the terminal server – very useful to admins!

To solve this make sure that .NET framework 3.5 is installed.

Made sure that youhave Version 7 of TS client installed on the XP machine.

You can download this from: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=20609
(Note: even though this is version 7 it shows up as V6.1 under the file version in XP!)

Renamed this file: c:windowssystem32TsWpfWrp.exe to TsWpfWrp_OLD.exe (this was version 3.0.6920.1109 on our XP machines) just as a backup.

Copy a Win 7 version of the file to the same location – latest version we found was 3.0.6920.1201.

This solved both the error coming up and weird characters being printed.

Breakthepaywall 1.3.0 now available

BreakthePaywall! is a free add-on for Internet Explorer 7 or higher using Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 that simplifies using the various methods for circumventing website paywall restrictions.

NEW Version 1.3.0 now available! – this latest release solves the problems with Microsoft’s August 2011 update for IE which changed the way cookies are stored and also adds functionality for deleting Flash cookies and HTML5 DOM Storage. Go to the download area to install the latest version.

Locking after Autologon using Wizmo

We occasionally have to setup a server to autologon after a re-boot.

This is usually required to support an application that needs to be logged on e.g. to perform data updates every 12 hours.

Autologon can be achieved by following the instructions in the following Microsoft article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324737

However, once logged on the desktop is accessible by anyone. For instance you may have a remote terminal application like VNC running for remote access to the server – if someone tried to connect the server IP using VNC they will get immediate access to the desktop without having to enter a password.

We needed some way of locking the desktop immediately after logging on – enter ‘Wizmo’, a utility created by the great Steve Gibson at Gibson Research. Amongst the many functions of this neat utility is a locking function. You can run it from the command line as follows:

wizmo.exe lock

Just create a batch file or script file with this command and put it in the startup folder of the profile you are autologging on as.

Wizmo can be downloaded from: http://www.grc.com/wizmo/wizmo.htm