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Written by Gregory Scot Collins

Friday, 29 February 2008, 5:08 AM

Finally, my main desktop computer started acting flaky, randomly shutting off in the middle of work. It became frequent enough that I had to replace it. I bought a new quad core system and began to build it out, again hitting the same aggravating issue. I went from the fire back into the frying pan: replacing a dying computer with one that can't be used efficiently for development. I rebuilt this new machine three times with various configurations and with different installation ordering of the applications. Each ended in the same result—and this, again, was without installing any updates!

Then, in a stroke of mixed inspiration/desperation, I tried something I had never thought of before, I used Windows Easy Transfer. Well, the first time it didn't work because I was trying to go from a 64-bit to a 32-bit Windows install, which is not allowed. So after rebuilding yet again, I started the transfer. Being a very large transfer (the entire computer), it was going to take all night long, so I left it and came back in the morning only to find that it failed somewhere at the beginning and never completed. So I scaled it back to a minimal transfer, which completed without issue, and wham, preview was now working!

After performing the Easy Transfer, I exported my registry to a file. I then did a system restore to before the transfer, verified that preview was again not working, and then exported my registry to a second file. Reapplying the first file to the registry got preview working again. I was on to it now! There was definitely some registry setting(s) at the root of this issue. Now all I needed to do was to compare the before and after files to find the change. However, I could not find any diffing tool that could handle two 250MB registry files! I had only one that was able to compare them, but it would lock up trying to view the diffs. Attempts to break apart the registry files into smaller files proved an arduous task for any editor due to the sheer size of the files.

At some point I did something that froze up my machine, requiring me to rebuild it yet again. However, I still had my saved registry files. Um, yeah. . . . at one point, I made the sad mistake of applying the registry file from the previous build to the rebuilt system. That was a big mistake—don't ever do that! There are a lot of settings very specific to your installation that no longer apply when you rebuild your system. Those do nasty things to Windows. Another rebuild.

This time I saved out the registry in smaller chunks to several files, did the Easy Transfer again, verified preview worked, and then did a matching set of registry exports. Now I had smaller files to deal with. But there were still far too many changes to be comparing: needle in a haystack? I didn't know what to look for, so to simplify things, I randomly chose a registry file and applied it. That wasn't it; restore and try another one. Got it! It was a fairly small one, so I tried applying sections of it until several hours later I tracked it down to a single registry entry. Elated and overjoyed, I reported my findings to the Microsoft tester to get more information on what exactly this setting did.