A client came to us with an interesting problem -- his laptop was removed from his company's domain and his documents were no longer available to him. He could see the mapped drive, and the folders and files, but when he tried to launch any of the files, he got an "Access Denied" error.

So, offline files had his documents stored locally, but his lack of network credentials was keeping us from them.

While massively inconvenient, this is how it should be. No credentials, no files. Downside, of course, was I couldn't get the documents copied to the local drive.

Windows 2003 Resource Kit to the rescue!

There's a utility, csccmd.exe which, as the name imples, allows you to work with the "client side cache" (the pre-release name for Offline Files). The most recent version of the csccmd.exe has an option to EXTRACT files from the client side cache and put them on the local drive somewhere.

So, I grabbed the Windows 2003 Resource Kit, downloaded it, installed it,and ran csccmd.exe and it didn't work.

Wha?

Seems there is a NEWER version of csccmd.exe that is only available (officially) from MS Product Support Services (PSS). (Unofficially, use bing to google csccmd.exe 1.1) which does the job. I downloaded it and copied it into c:\windows (just to avoid path issues).

(I assume it's only available from PSS because it totally bypasses the security issue.)

So, logged in as an administrator, I created a temporary folderand opened a command prompt (do I show my age by insisting on calling it a DOS window?) and typed:

csccmd.exe /extract:\\server\share /target:c:\temp\user /recurse

Ta-da!

The files copied, rights of the folder they were copied into prevails (which is to say that the ACL information was not extracted as well) and he's happy because he has his documents back.

Back when Windows 3.1 came out, it shipped with "display" fonts -- these were bitmapped fonts and the precursor to True type fonts -- who knew they'd still be vital in Windows Server 2003.

A client had a problem with their Great Plains installation -- the fonts went all screwy and while they could still make out the display (barely) they couldn't print checks since the Mekorma font they were using wasn't playing nice.

Clicking on the start menu revealed the username to be in the Marlett font, a font Windows uses for drawing parts of its UI (the X in the close box, the minimize and maximize symbols, etc.). we've seen this problem before, and it's usually fixed by running TweakUI and reparing the font folder. Reboot and voila.

So we do that and the checks can print, but the display font is still not right in Great Plains. Everywhere else in Windows it's fine, but Great Plains is still hinky.

We try all sorts of things -- we delete all the fonts and reinstall them from the c:\windows\fonts folder of a sister Windows 2003 server; no dice.

We troll Great Plains newsgroups, we repair the font folder, we do a repair installation of Great Plains, nothing does the trick.

It has to be a font issue, but which fonts?

We have the Great Plains consultant send over his theory -- a Helvetica font set. Does nothing.

Over at Experts-Exchange (a site well worth the subscription), one of the Great Plains MVPs who was helping us out posted a screen shot of her splash screen, and when compared to ours, I thought to myself "that looks like MS Sans Serif" -- a system font from way back when.

Windows XP brought along a new set of fonts it used in its shell, and MS Sans Serif was deprecated in favor of Verdana, Tahoma and the "modern" UI fonts Microsoft was putting forth.

I opened up a share on a Windows 2000 box, and there was a whole bunch of .fon fonts that weren't on our system. So I copied them over to a temp folder and tried to install them onto our server. Only 3 showed up in the list, and there were a dozen or more in the folder.

Ah! They were hidden. I uncheck the hidden attribute and reinstall the fonts. All of them show up in the list.

I select all, click OK, I get a few "a version of this font is already installed" errors, and then they're done importing.

Now, MS Sans Serif is in the list of available fonts, and lo and behold, our screen is back to normal.

Many thanks to Victoria Yudin who helped us with this issue.

In what is becoming a series, we'll further tweak our code to allow for filtering of the query.

In the original code, we open a query directly as a recordset. This fails if the query requires some parameters.

(I'm not going to demonstrate a way to get user input and use that as the parameter. You should be able to copy and paste the code from the original user input sections of the code and modify as needed.)

To start, let's discuss the query and it's parameter.

In our original code, the query was just pulling a list of email addresses. For this, let's filter that list of addresses by domain.
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If you're worried about this <scary voice>virus of doom</scary voice> that everyone's gone mental over, you might want to pop over to The Conficker Eye Chart that the Conficker Working Group has put together.

Basicially, the eye chart is a page that loads images from sites that Conficker actively blocks. So, if you can see all the images, you're not infected. Pretty clever.

If you are infected, you might want to drop us a line.

Perhaps the most popular article on the site explains how to send email to a bunch of people using Access and Outlook.

It has garnered its fair share of comments and emails, and one came in today that I figured I'd share and then elaborate on.

The mail reads (in part):

I have a following question: How to modify this module to be able to send messages to various mailing lists that I predefine in respective queries? In other words, I have in my database 3 categories of customers (in 3 different queries) andI want to address them with a different message. Do I need to create 3 macros running 3 modules each referring to a separate query with a given category of customers or is there another way to do it?

You don't have to create modules for each list, you just need to be able to tell the macro which query you want to use before running it.
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