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Your suggestion is a little over the top for this industry. People buy their machine from a dealer who should provide this support which apparently is not happening for this lady. This level of computer support is not something that is expected of a designer. My price point is just right for the 14,000 people on my mailing list and with the exception of a corrupted download now and then, there is no expectation of further support. I was just trying to help out a lady who is not computer literate.

This is an online business with a worldwide audience so I can’t just visit her home to assist, even if I wanted to. I have had others on my mailing list who have the same machine reach out to her but even that hasn’t helped.

It’s like buying groceries and then expecting someone from the store to come to your house and show you how to make your stove heat up. Your store may sell you a cook book or provide a contact to a cooking school but there is no expectation that they are going to come and cook your dinner for you.

There are literally hundreds of machine models on the market today and over 60 software formats for the designs. No designer is expected to support every model and format and my business clearly advertises the formats that I sell. She bought the correct format but her machine is out of date so she can’t use it. I’ve already refunded the $6.00 although the mistake was hers.

I just thought that there might be a remote assistance service somewhere that she could pay for.

Thank you but I need her to hire someone to do it for her. I’m a designer, not a computer support technician. I can’t get involved with one customer on such a technical (and time consuming) level. The bottom line for me is that her purchase from me was for $6.00 and I normally don’t have any interaction with customers other than sending them the designs they purchase. I’ve already spent several hours trying to assist her and simply can’t afford any more time over this small purchase. I’m hoping to find a company that would do this for a proper fee that I could recommend to her.

Thanks,
Jan

Paypal’s emails are definitely causing this issue, but it seems an obvious Outlook bug. Outlook simply cannot crash or get stuck indefinitely because of an HTML message.

To solve it, I created a rule to send the paypal messages to the junk folder, where links are not displayed as such. This works.
I am also trying to remove paypal from the safe senders list, hoping that it will sort the issue without needing the previous rule.

I moved one to the junk mail folder and it does open without “phoning home” to that bad site so that’s a good thing. But Outlook won’t let me reply to the email which is essential. It keeps telling me I have to move it back to a regular folder, which just reinstates the problem. How did you get that to work?

Thanks,
GiGi

I’m having the same “contacting the server” problem but only with emails from PayPal. I’ve captured a specific IP address that keeps popping up which resolves to a server at Adobe. It takes about 2 minutes to open any message from PayPal and once my reply is written, it takes another two minutes for Outlook (2010) to send it. During this time, the “not responding” appears at the top. If I just leave it alone, it usually resolves itself. I’ve asked PayPal for help but it has been several days and they tell me the engineers are working on it and that it is a high priority but there has been no word from them on a fix. It happens in Outlook 2007, 2003 and 2010 but if I read my email in the webversion of my ISP, it doesn’t hang up.

I’ve tried it with and without my anti-virus and firewall (no change). I’ve rebooted the router, the modem and the computer. (no change). I’ve repaired the .pst file. (no change). From the thread above, it sounds like I need to disable the adobe add-ins although that is going to be a real pain since I regularly print to pdf to capture a permanent record of sales information.

If anyone else has any other suggestions, please let me know.

1.Crack it maybe? ( http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/ ) by booting to a live CD.
2.Boot to safe mode and get in via the real Administrator account? Since XPMode is modified I don’t know if this will work.
3.Otherwise might have to toss it and start a new one.

I found an easier solution and wanted to post it here for future reference. If you go back to the Win 7 OS and right click on the icon or start menu option for XP mode, one of the options is Settings. Within that dialog box, there is a setting for Login Credentials. That can be set to None. That let me back into the virtual machine.

You have chosen to arrange the contents of the folder within some kind of grouping (most likely ‘by tag’), and for these items the ‘group’ has not been indicated. This is governed by the ‘Arrange by’ link at the top-right corner of the Explorer window. Or it could be via the ‘Group By’ entry in the View menu.

Gosh, that’s an interesting explanation. I have never see or used either of those features the way you describe them. I can’t find the “Arrange by” link you mentioned.

I do see the Group By but have never used it from a menu like this. Could Win 7 be trying to help me out by assigning something based on the content of the folders? Or, if I put the folder in detail mode and click on Date or Filetype to reorder it, perhaps that is the source of the issue?

Obviously this isn’t earth-shattering. I’m just trying to understand what is going on.

Thanks for your response!
Jan

I have never seen this. Could you post a screen shot? Hit CTRL-PrtScn to capture just the current window (Explorer showing this phenomenon), and post that.

I’ve attached a couple of screen shots that include the address of the folder. One is the root directory, others drill down a little. You will see “unspecified” at the top of some but not all. The number is the number of items in the folder. These are just windows explorer screen shots, not a search result or anything like that. It also doesn’t matter what view I’m using on a folder (large, list, details, etc.).

Thanks,
Jan

when did this start?

I bought the computer (win 7 -64 bit) in February and truthfully didn’t notice this until earlier this summer. I was having a problem and did some screen shots that included that “Unspecified ##” at the top and the person I was working with at the time mentioned it. That’s when I got curious. I’ll send screen shots about 3:30 PM Eastern Time (when I get home from work).

Sorry, I missed this last night and I’m at work now. This is on my home computer. I’ll get you a couple of shots of what I mean as soon as I get home.

Thanks!
Jan

i’m trying this one :)is this a paid version of winzip? i tried it’s eval version and working fine with my jpeg 😉

Yes, I have paid for Winzip all the way back to version 9. I have downloaded a couple of other free zip utilities and neither is having this problem so it’s time to move away from WinZip.

Thanks for the suggestions and replies!

Jan

try using cloud as your av for now, scan your pc again with spybotsd, threatfire wont hurt also and try scanning your pc with ad-aware. this has nothing to do with winzip, or indexing. can you give an idea of what was inside that zipped folder? did you downloaded it from a trusted site?

This is a zipped file that I created on another machine and moved to this one. It has a set of 10 graphics (regular jpgs) that I created in it. That (creation) machine has every kind of security protection imaginable so it was not the source of a problem. Winzip 14.5 is definitely the issue. I just downloaded two free zip utilities and both of them handled this correctly. I could unzip and then find the files/folders with no problems. I tried WinZip once more and it seems to unzip these same files but they don’t show up anywhere but inside the Winzip file open dialog box.

As a further test, I used a third machine to zip some files with a much older version of winzip and can replicate this now every time. WinZip 14.5 won’t work properly while the two free utilities do.

I have had customers write and say that they are unable to use files that were sent in zipped files and I thought it was user error on their end. I just put two and two together now to realize that the issue is with the zipped files made with WinZip 14.5.

I appreciate the suggestions for other AV packages but I use a site license for a professional level AV on my machines and don’t want to change it. My AV is an enterprise level package that includes malware protection. I did run ad-aware and got a clean bill of health.

Jan

That just opened up a whole new can of worms. The Event log service won’t start and the error is: Error 4201: The instance name passed was not recognized as valid by a WMI data provider.

I found loads of references to this but none that fix the problem so I can’t see if any applications are generating errors. Now I’m off to see if I can find a solution for this!

Jan

I found the solution and got the Event viewer going. I don’t have any error messages that would explain this. However I’m pretty convinced now that WinZip is the culprit. I just used Winzip to unzip a set of files. While in the dialog box to extract files, I created a directory and extracted the files to that directory. Actually, I did it three times – two new directories and then also extracted the files to an existing directory. I can’t see any of these in My computer – the folders or the files. I even opened a DOS window and they don’t show up there either. The only place I can see them is when WinZip is open. I used Winzip’s open file dialog box to check and the attributes seem normal (not hidden, not read only) and it says I have complete control in the security tab.

I’ll go post a request for support with WinZip – but has anyone else experienced anything like this?

Thanks,
Jan

Have you checked the event viewer to see if there are errors being logged?

Joe

That just opened up a whole new can of worms. The Event log service won’t start and the error is: Error 4201: The instance name passed was not recognized as valid by a WMI data provider.

I found loads of references to this but none that fix the problem so I can’t see if any applications are generating errors. Now I’m off to see if I can find a solution for this!

Jan

have you check for any malwares or something? what is the specs of your pc?
when was the last time this happens? are there any softwares you can remember been installed before this thing happen?

I run a nightly scan for viruses and malware and it comes up clean. This is an HP desktop with 4 Gb of RAM (new in February) and a 1 terabyte hard drive. It came with Win 7 Home and I upgraded it to Win 7 Pro. This started happening a few weeks ago and at first I thought I had misplaced or deleted a file here and there. I finally noticed exactly what was going on when I unzipped some files and placed them in a new folder. When I used Explorer to go look at that folder, I couldn’t see it. So I went back to Winzip and tried again. This time it didn’t show the new folder but said that the folder already existed so I couldn’t create it again. I even rebooted thinking that would help and it didn’t. I couldn’t see the new folder. I ended up creating new folders with 3 different names and none of them showed up. I finally extracted the contents of that zipped file into an existing folder and found the files. Then, yesterday, when I was looking for something else, I opened Windows Explorer and all three of those other folders were visible. There just doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to what shows up and what doesn’t.

I don’t install anything on this machine unless it is absolutely necessary (i.e., windows updates). It has Office 2003 (so I can use Outlook) and WordPerfect 14 so I can do real work; Carbonite for back up. The main purpose of the machine is for digitizing embroidery designs so I have specific software for that however all of these have been on the machine since I bought it. I truly can’t identify one piece of software that was installed when this started happening.

Could this be an indexing problem with Win7? Or is there a limit to the number of files that can be in any one folder?

Thanks,
Jan

In the File Open dialog, is “All Files” (in the drop-down right above the Open button) selected or only a specific file type or set of file types?

Inside applications, yes, “all files” is option chosen. That isn’t an option in Windows Explorer or My Computer because I’m not trying to open anything. The files just don’t show up no matter what view I’m using. No matter what is selected inside applications or in My Computer though, folders should appear and some of them don’t show up either.

Any other ideas?

Jan