Customize Start Menu for All Users

You may want, like me, to delete or add some shortcuts to the start menu.

On Windows Vista this changes aren’t made on C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu folder.

Instead, changes for all users must be made by default on C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu

Vista – Add to Favorites – Unspecified Error

Yesterday I’ve installed a fresh copy of Windows Vista (with SP1 by the way…) and like before I’ve moved my Favorites folder to a new location. Like before I got an error when trying to add new bookmarks to my favorites folder. I don’t know yet if this problem occurs when you don’t move the favorites folder to some place else.

Normally the error says something like “Cannot add ‘xxxxxx’. Unspecified Error”.

So, here it’s the solution for this issue:

- Open command prompt with elevated privileges (runas administrator)

- Navigate to the level where your favorites folder is.

- Execute this command line: icacls favorites /setintegritylevel (OI)(CI)low

Problem solved!

How to access administrative share (C$) on Windows Vista

You may find some problems when trying to access to an administrative share, like C$ or D$ for example.

The following registry tweak makes possible to all local administrators to access them:

- Navigate to Windows Registry (Start -» Run -» regedit.exe)
- Browse to the following folder:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
\CurrentVersion\Policies\system
- Right-click a blank area in the right pane
- Click New
- Click DWORD Value
- Type: LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy
- Double-click the item you just created
- Type 1 into the box
- Click OK
- Restart your computer

Vista Unattended – KB929399-v2 Deployment Issues

At my job, we should start to deploy Windows Vista to agencies and central branchs next year, and a lot of work must be done.
The redesigned BDD (now known as Microsoft Depoloyment), the redesigned RIS (now known as Windows Deployment Services(WDS)) and Windows Automatic Installation Kit (WAIK), give a lot of new tools and deployment methods that need some comprehensive reading.

So…last week I started to take a more deep look at the Windows Vista Deployment.
After creating a simple answer file, that by the way has changed name and type (unattend.txt/Unattended.xml), I started looking to the new feature that makes possible to install OS hotfixes (system updates and security updates) in a very simple way.
After making some tests with just a couple of hotifxes, I’ve run Windows Update and Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer 2.1 on a reference machine and downloaded all the updates. I’ve then applied the hotfixes via Deployment Workbench (WAIK) and started deploying the image using WDS.

On the Install Update Passe I found an error that was killing the unattended installation:

Setup failed applying image \\S-W2K8WDS-V01\Distribution$\OperationSystems\Windows Vista Ent\Sources\install.wim, rc = 31
ZTI ERROR – Non-zero return code by LTIApply, rc = 31
Non-zero return code executing command “X:\Deploy\Tools\X86\TsmBootstrap.exe” /env:SAStartm, rc = -2147467259

This is a very very generic error, with no reference about what has failed in all log files you can fin, and after a while you will feel lost!
In  my case I had applied 39 hotfixes…
So to understand where the error was, I had to start deploying the hotfixes almost one-by-one to figure out where the bad file was.

After a lot of time I’ve found that the hotfix giving the problem was WindowsMedia11-KB929399-v2-x86-INTL.exe(a Windows Media Player 11 SDK Update).

I’ve Googled a little and found this:
http://www.myitforum.com/forums/m_166236/mpage_1/tm.htm#167364

I’ve not tested it yet!