Yesterday I got a report from my customer that her computer is being infected by virus. Her description of the problem in her computer was computer is slow, can’t save any documents because her hard drive is nearly full although she doesn’t have much files, and Internet Explorer font is weird.

The first thing that I always do before anything is run MSCONFIG (System Configuration Utility) and check the startup entries there. It’s not the best tool to check for every programs that starts up with Windows, but it’s a basic one which is able to give me a rough idea if the computer is infected by virus or not.

When I go to Start, Run, type MSCONFIG and click OK, I got the error message “Windows cannot find ‘msconfig’. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again. To search for a file, click the Start button, and then click Search.”

Usually virus is the culprit for removing msconfig, regedit and etc from Run command. Anyway, here’s how I manage to bring back MSCONFIG to the Run command.


First of all, we need to make sure that the MSCONFIG file is still in your drive. Surprisingly MSConfig.exe is not located in Windows or System32 directory. Two ways to find where MSConfig.exe is. You can either use Windows search to look for *msconfig* or go to another computer, use Process Explorer to find the path to MSConfig.

As you can see, Process Explorer clearly shows that MSConfig.exe is located in C:\Windows\PCHealth\HelpCtr\Binaries\MSConfig.exe.

Go to C:\Windows\PCHealth\HelpCtr\Binaries\ and check if MSConfig.exe file is there or not. If it’s not there, you can copy it from another computer to the Binaries folder or if you only have Windows XP CD, open a command prompt window, insert your XP CD into the drive and enter the following command: (assuming D is your CD drive and C is where your Windows is installed)

EXPAND -R D:\I386\MSCONFIG.EX_ C:\WINDOWS\PCHEALTH\HELPCTR\BINARIES

That should restore MSConfig.exe to your Windows. IF MSConfig.exe is already there and you still can’t launch MSCONFIG from Run command, then the reference to the path within the registry may be wrong. Check this location in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\MSCONFIG.EXE

In the right pane, next to Default, it should show:

C:\WINDOWS\PCHealth\HelpCtr\Binaries\MSConfig.exe

Once you have both MSConfig.exe file in your computer and the registry path is set correctly, you shouldn’t have problems running msconfig command from Run.

In addition to the fix above, here’s a very good tool that is able to create usable copies of REGEDIT, MSCONFIG and Task Manager which I found from Doug’s website. This small VB 6 utility will create a usable backup copy of Taskmgr.exe, MSConfig.exe and Regedit.EXE in a new folder, called C:\EmergencyUtils. The new copies will be named Copy_of_Taskmgr.exe, Copy_of_MSConfig.exe and Copy_of_Regedit.com.

These programs are extremely helpful, and usually necessary in helping to rid your computer of a viral infection. Many virus programs will intercept these programs, based on their original file name, and prevent them from running. The alternate copies will not encounter this problem. Simply navigate to the C:\EmergencyUtils folder and double click the file you need to run.

[ Download XP Emergency Utility Copier ]

Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google. It is fast and supposed to be stable. Sulav came to live support yesterday reporting that Google Chrome stopped working. All he got was a popup saying “The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000142). Click on OK to terminate the application.” You might also get another error code which is (0xc0000005). Reinstalling the latest Google Chrome did not solve the problem.

Did a little research and found that there is a known problem caused by Symantec product but Sulav is using Avast Antivirus. Fortunately I’ve managed to find workarounds to stop Google Chrome from crashing whenever its being ran.


There are two workarounds to this Google Chrome crashing problem. You can either use the --no-sandbox or --in-process-plugins switch when launching Google Chrome. Both should fix the crashing problem but there is a huge difference between this 2 switches as each has its own pros and cons, so you should decide yourself which option is more important for you.

By default Google Chrome enables Sandbox security. It is designed to prevent malware from getting installed on the system. Using the --no-sandbox option leaves your computer more vulnerable to flaws or security exploits on those pages. This switch is more suitable for those tech savvy people who don’t need to rely on antivirus program to keep their computer from being infected by computer viruses.

As for the --in-process-plugins, by default, Chrome runs plug-ins in separate processes from the browser itself. An advantage of doing this is if a plug-in crashes, it won’t cause the entire browser to crash. So the --in-process-plugins switch tells Chrome to run plug-ins in the same process as the browser. This switch is more suitable for users who is not able to determine if the website they visiting is dangerous or not.

Now you understand which switch to use, here is how to run Google Chrome with these switches.

1. Make sure you close all running programs.

2. Right click on the Google Chrome icon at your desktop or Start Menu and select Properties.

3. Go to the Shortcut tab if you’re not already there, add the switch at the end of the target. By default the last character is double quote, so you’ll need to add a space then followed by --no-sandbox OR --in-process-plugins. Do take note that there is two dashes.

4. Now run Google Chrome as normal. You won’t see the 0xc0000142 or 0xc0000005 crash popup anymore.

What really caused the 0xc0000142 crash on Google Chrome? I really have no idea because I couldn’t find anything on it and I am a full time Firefox user.

Just woke up today and got a news that the most popular instant messenger Windows Live Messenger has been updated to 2009! I immediately updated it and found that the interface is much nicer with a lot of flashy effects and shadows like what you usually see in Windows Vista. There are a lot of new features and more than 200 bugs have been fixed.

Usually I am well informed when a new Windows Live Messenger is about to release but this time is like a big surprise to me. Have you noticed that a lot of software released this year goes with “2009″? This is like the first time Windows Live Messenger includes the year as a version number although they still maintain the internal build version number.

What’s new in Windows Live Messenger 2009:

User interface has been updated, including the toasts

Sign-in screen has been restyled

New program/tray icon

Updated e-mail icon showing the number of new e-mails more clearly

Updated Group window header

SkyDrive officially replaces sharing folders feature (Actions > View your online files)

Expanded What’s new area shows more details (eg. complete Tweets, added pictures, etc.) and Post a note has been updated for some items

What’s new per contact in conversation window

You cannot choose your own signature sound any longer. You can only assign signature sounds to your contacts

Webcam snapshot has been renamed to Webcam Picture

Tile with moods has been renamed to Dynamic Picture

Modify moods, videos and/or pictures of previously made Dynamic Pictures

Change scene option added to status dropdown list

More default Scenes

Updated and new static/animated display pictures featuring the Messenger buddy, Morty and Daisy

Windows 7 Jumplists

Save pictures presented through PhotoShare (Previous photo/Next photo/Save photo)

What’s new list options accessible through an icon next to What’s new header, or from a button in Options > Layout

I am sure there are a bunch of other new features which haven’t been discovered yet. I’ve chatted with one of my cousin and everything just looks great! So go ahead and update your Windows Live Messenger to 2009 if you haven’t done so. Mess Patch and A-Patch haven’t been updated to work with MSN 2009 but the Messenger Plus! Live is compatible with this build although not fully functional. We’ll just have to wait a little longer for the patchers to be updated and I’m sure it won’t be long.

To download and install the latest Windows Live Messenger 2009, you’ll have to download Windows Live Installer which contains installation files for all software programs inside the Windows Live products, such as Windows Mail, Photo Gallery, Toolbar, Writer, and etc. By default all program will be selected, so if you don’t need them, just uncheck all of it and make sure that only Messenger is checked. If you already have the old version of Windows Live Messenger installed, you will see that Messenger is at the lower section that says “This program will be updated”.

[ Download Windows Live Messenger 2009 ]

Firefox is simply the best web browser. In my opinion, no other browser such as Opera, Internet Explorer, Chrome or Safari can beat Firefox. I’ve been using it for a very long time now and am very satisfied with it. However the only problem that I face with Firefox browser is it gets annoyingly slow after using it for a few months. Every morning when I launch Firefox and type a couple of letters in the URL location bar, it hangs for a while, then only it shows a bunch of suggested links. Even when I close Firefox, it takes a while for the firefox.exe process to be terminated.

I figured that since Firefox hangs when I am typing in the URL, it could probably be that I have a huge list of history. My Firefox 3 has all the default configurations and I never change anything. By default Firefox remembers my browsing history for 90 days which means that Firefox will remember the URL of the site that I visited for the past 3 months.

So I did a little investigation on my Firefox history list to check if it is the culprit that causes my Firefox to respond slowly.


I downloaded a free tool called MozillaHistoryView which reads the history data file of Firefox Web browser, and displays the list of all visited Web pages in the last day. Again it took quite a while for MozillaHistoryView to load the history file and I was shocked to see that I have 72184 links in my Firefox history! If you divide 72184 with 90 days, I visit an average of 800 websites a day, 33 every hour! Beat that and you’ll be the next raymond.cc 😛 (I’m just joking)

My idea of fixing this Firefox slow respond problem is to export all the history into a text file so I can search for it at a later time when I need it and then delete the Firefox history file to start all over again. Starting in Firefox 3, both the bookmarks and browsing history are stored in the places.sqlite file, located in the Firefox profile folder. Since the bookmark is also saved in the same file as history, I will need to backup my bookmarks as well. When I am done with that, I will try lowering down the number of days from 90 days to 45 days for Firefox to remember my browsing history.

Backup Firefox Bookmarks
1. Click Bookmarks from the menu bar and select Organize Bookmarks.
2. Click the Import and Backup button and select Backup.
3. Save the bookmark backup .json file to a location that you remember on your hard drive.

Export Firefox Browsing History
1. Download MozillaHistoryView and run it.
2. You can either export it to text or HTML format. For HTML format, go to View and select “HTML Report – All Items”. For text file, go to Edit and click on Select All. Then go to File and select Save Selected Items.

Delete Firefox Browsing History File (places.sqlite)
1. Make sure that Firefox is not running
2. Go to RUN, type %appdata%/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/ and hit Enter.
3. You should see a folder with random letters and numbers followed by a .default (eg; 89ns5tbp.default)
4. Go in to the folder and rename the places.sqlite file to places.sqlite.bak

Note: I noticed that clearing the “Browsing History” from Firefox doesn’t make the size of places.sqlite file smaller. That’s why I resort to letting Firefox re-create a new places.sqlite file.

Run Firefox now and you should notice that Firefox no longer slow or hangs. To restore your bookmarks, go to Bookmarks in your menu bar and select Organize Bookmarks. Then click the Import and Backup button > Restore > Choose File. Select the file that your backed up earlier.

Lower Firefox History Size
1. Go to Tools > Options..
2. Click on the Privacy button and click on the drop down menu for Remember History. Select “Use custom settings for history”.
3. Set the “Remember my browsing history for at least XX days” to 45 and click OK.

Firefox developers should set a lower number of days for Firefox to remember the browsing history as default. 90 days is probably way too high and can cause the browser to crawl even on a Windows XP computer with 2GB of RAM.

I believe sometimes you find files that are called “images” and it is required you to burn them into CD or DVD. Image file is a file containing an exact representation of the data that will be placed on the CD-ROM. CD Image files are often written as the first step in the pre-mastering process when the complexity of the disc makes “On-the-fly” recording impossible. In these cases the CD Image file is created from the source data on the hard disk then transferred to the CD Recorder.

Here’s a FREE software you can easily use to burn the CD images to a CD or DVD with 3 steps.

1. Insert Disc in Burner.
2. Select Image to burn.
3. Click ‘Write’ button.

ImgBurn can write most types of CD / DVD images and it supports all the latest writers (including booktype / bitsetting on many of the major ones – i.e. BenQ, LiteOn, NEC, Plextor, Sony). You can even use ImgBurn to erase / format your rewritable media!

ImgBurn will try its very best to burn your DVD-Video double layer images using the layer break you’ve specified in the IFO files, but it can also calculate the best place for you, to save you the trouble.

Advanced functionality can be found in context menus that appear when you right click on various bits of the user interface.
ImgBurn supports burning BIN, CDI, CDR, DI, DVD, GCM, GI, IBQ, IMG, ISO, LST, MDS, NRG, PDI and UDI image files to a CD or DVD depending your on drive.

[ Download ImgBurn v2.4.1.0 | ImgBurn Website ]

Here’s something different to share with you all today. I was browsing the Internet and stumbled on two interesting websites that provides reports on “Top 500 Worst Passwords of All Time” and “Distribution of passwords between men and women“. From this two reports, I get to learn what are the most common bad password that normally people use and also I know that most of these lousy guessable passwords are used by men. These passwords seemed to be the same whenever an account database is analyzed.

Do you know that the all time most used password is 123456? I didn’t know that until today and I have to admit that I am one of them that uses passwords like “123456″ or “password” out of convenience but I only use them when I felt that the account is not important and I have no problem losing it.


I know a big percentage of this blog site’s visitors are men, so ask yourself whether are you using any of the password listed in the 2 reports? If yes, then I’d advice you to change your password to a better one which cannot be brute forced by a dictionary list. A good password is something that you cannot find in dictionary which consist of at least 8 characters of numbers and words.

You shouldn’t also rely on those password generators because they generate totally random characters and chances are you won’t even remember them unless you write it down somewhere. Forgetting your password and trying to recover them back is a hassle too.

I again wanted to take a break from posting but I couldn’t resist sharing a new year’s gift to all of you courtesy of Emil. I bet some of you have heard about operating system virtualization software such as VirtualBox, XEN, Hyper-V, VMWare and VirtualPC. If not, they are software that allows you to run multiple operating system simultaneously on 1 computer. For example, you have Windows Vista installed on your hard disk and you can run other operating system such as Windows XP and Linux as a program from Windows Vista.

Another very good OS virtualization software is Parallels Workstation. It is a powerful, easy-to-use, and cost-effective desktop virtualization solution. It enables the user to create completely networked, totally secure independent virtual machines on a single physical computer. Parallels Workstation is empowered by a lightweight hypervisor, a thin layer of software that “works” between the host computer’s hardware and the primary operating system. The lightweight hypervisor controls some of the host computer’s hardware resources, which results in dramatically more stable, secure, and higher-performing virtual machines. Each virtual machine has its own set of virtual hardware: processor, RAM, floppy, CD and DVD drives, I/O devices, and hard disk.

Parallels Workstation normally cost $49.99 for a single user license but if you follow the steps below, you will get the genuine activation key free of charge!


As you can see at the image below, the computer is running Windows XP but has Xandros and OS/2 Warp Server running simultaneously using Parallels Workstation for Windows.

1. Go to http://www.parallels.com/getkey/lunarp/

2. Enter your name, email, company, phone number and click Submit.

3. You can download the latest Parallels Workstation v2.2 build 2222 for Windows or Linux at the next page. There are EXE format for Windows, and DEB, TGZ and RPM for Linux.

4. Check your email that you entered in the form at step 2. You should receive an email from noreply@parallels.com (Parallels) with the subject Lunarpages Registration. Note down the 25 digit activation key.

5. Install Parallels Workstation and during installation, you’ll be asked to provide valid information to receive a free trial activation key. Click Skip registration button.

6. Enter the Parallels Workstation activation key. Username should be already there but if not, just enter anything.

According to Wikipedia, Parallels Workstation has known limitation that includes:

Can only run 32-bit operating systems.

Inability to assign multiple CPUs to your virtual machine to gain additional performance for CPU-intensive workloads.

DVD/CD-ROM “pass-through” access has not been implemented, which means that it is impossible to use DVD and CD burners exclusively in guest virtual machines.

Supported memory limit for all virtual machines is 4 GB, and memory limit for a single virtual machine is 1500 MB.

Devices such as USB mice, memory keys, webcams, and mobile phones have been cited on the company’s support forum as not working correctly[citation needed]. The support team has promised to fix some of these issues, but has not indicated when users can expect a fix.

Network emulation does not support NAT.

It seemed like some of the free operating system virtualization software has better features than Parallels Workstation. The last time Parallels Workstation updated was on January 31st 2008 and I wonder if the company is working on an updated version to fix the known limitations above? No matter what, it’s still free and no harm grabbing the free license! Happy New Year 2009 everyone!

Thanks again Emil!

I got an email from Jake asking me about how to check where is the location of an IP address. OK, I try to enable IP address logging in my website wherever I can. If you send an email using the contact form, your IP address and hostname will be attached to the message that you send to me. Whenever you’re logged in to forum, I get to see your IP address. If you leave a comment on any of my articles, your IP address will be logged. Once you get in to raymond.cc, your IP address will automatically be logged by Webalizer. Don’t be afraid as it is used mainly for statistical purposes only. Other than that, it is good to have IP address logging because I get to see where the nice and bad people are from.

For example, I get to know most of the nice “thank you” emails that I get are from people in US. And then sadly there’s one particular person from MALAYSIA occasionally leaves useless and nonsense comments which can be easily deleted with a click. There’s also another country (which I don’t want to reveal) where many people beg for stuff (rapidshare, hacking emails and etc).

IP address logging is very important for online shopping website too. Once I was handling an ebook website for a company and there were a lot of charge backs from a specific country. I purchased an IP to Country database and blocked everyone coming from that country. The earnings wasn’t affected and charge backs has been reduced.

If you have an IP address and would like to trace where is the location, here’s what I usually use.


My first choice is VisualRoute. There is a desktop version of VisualRoute which cost money but I prefer to use their free web service to trace an IP. This VisualRoute Server provides a graphical traceroute and ping test from its server to any other network device you choose, useful for pinpointing network connectivity problems and identifying IP address locations.

It’s very easy to use. Just enter the IP address that you want to trace and hit the Start button. To see the location of the IP address, click the Map tab. VisualRoute loads pretty slow because it requires Java.

[ Visit VisualRoute ]

My second choice is IP2Location. This company is from Malaysia and they have full databases of IP address to country plus many other options. They have a live product demo where you can enter an IP address, and it’ll find the IP address’s location.

If you’re wondering why are they selling databases of IP – Country, there are actually many uses for web developers. Like I mentioned above, I manage to filter access from countries that has high fraud rate. Other than that, you can also display native language and currency, redirect web pages based on geographical, auto-selection of country on forms and etc…

[ Visit IP2Location ]

There you have it, the 2 places where I go when I want to find out a location of an IP address. If you have any great sites that you use to trace an IP address, please share with us by leaving a comment.

No matter how big Facebook gets, I stand on my ground not to create a personal Facebook account. Although I am able to find a lot of old friends through Facebook but I don’t want to risk my personal information being used by anyone. Moreover anyone, especially your enemies can create a fake identity and spread bad things about you. You can try reporting the violation but most of these cases are being ignored unless you can get 2000 people to help you report it.

If you ask me if I have a Facebook account, yes I do have one without any personal information in it and it is only for the purpose of creating a Raymond.CC Technology Blog page so that I can share updates. Yesterday after publishing the post about DirectX Happy Uninstall, I had problems in sharing the link in my wall. I have no problems attaching a link but when I click the Share button, an error saying “Something went wrong. We’re working on getting it fixed as soon as we can” is shown on the page.

From the looks of this error, it seems like a generic error because it doesn’t have any error code, or specific explanation to the problem. I also doubt that Facebook engineers are actually getting it fixed as soon as they can. So I’ve decided to investigate on this Something Went Wrong problem.


I searched in Google and it appears that this problem has been ongoing for a very long time. Some people get it and some don’t. Anyway, my first suspect is that the cookies or cache has been corrupted so I used another web browser and surprisingly I was able to share this time without any problems.

Then today I tried to share a link and I got the dreaded something went wrong error again! Clearing the cache/cookies and changing to a different web browser did not solve the problem this time… At least I now know for sure that this problem is not caused by my computer. I noticed that this problem only occur when the Post Update only shows 2 methods of sharing which is Post and Link.

After playing around with Facebook for a couple of minutes, I got lucky and found the cause of something went wrong in Facebook problem. The rule is you have to create a Facebook account first in order to create a page. After created a page, you’re automatically an admin of the page. Now, if you haven’t noticed, you can switch between “Use Facebook as Page” and “Switch back to YourProfileName” from the Account drop down menu at the top right.

I noticed that when I am using facebook as my profile, sharing a post or link to my page will cause the error. All I need to do is switch to Use Facebook as Page and I can share status, photo, link, video and question to my page, instead of just seeing post and link.

The official Facebook page for this blog is http://www.facebook.com/www.raymond.cc. Do help to click on the Like button at our Facebook page if you have a Facebook account.

Last week I got a live chat request asking if I could help him find Windows XP driver for HP Pavilion A6540D. That HP desktop came with Vista pre-installed and there is no XP drivers for that model of PC in official HP website. We could easily downgrade from Vista to XP if we have the XP installation disc but the problem is we have to look for the drivers. If you didn’t know, even if the PC vendors such as Acer, HP and Dell doesn’t provide official XP drivers, we can still find working XP drivers for your computer hardware from the “manufacturer’s” website.

If we’re lucky, someone might have already searched for the correct drivers and posted it on the web. If not, it is very troublesome to identify each unknown devices, search for the drivers, download and test it. Let’s take my Acer laptop as an example. I downgraded from Vista to XP and there is 10 unknown devices (Audio, LAN, FingerPrinter Reader, Mass Storage Controller, Modem, Wireless, SM Bus, Video and 2 unrecognized devices)!

No way I am going to spend hours or perhaps even days looking up drivers for each unknown devices so I’ve figured out a way to automatically do it.


There are software that could scan your whole system for outdated or missing drivers and you can install the latest drivers with a few simple clicks without even searching the Internet. Every hardware has a unique ID and these software uses them to cross check with their driver database to find if there is a newer one available for your computer. So far I found

Do take note that different computer should get different results from the driver updating software. This test is done on my new laptop pre-installed with Windows Vista that was purchased 4 months ago. I installed Windows XP and used the software below to scan for drivers using my USB wireless broadband (Celcom) because there is no default drivers for my network card.

1. Driver Detective v6.4.0.4 ($29.95)
Found drivers for: Audio, FingerPrinter Reader, LAN, Mass Storage Controller, Modem, SM Bus, Video, Wireless.

2. Uniblue DriverScanner 2009 v2.0.0.49 (29.95)
Found drivers for: Audio, Chipset, LAN, Modem, SM Bus, Video, Wireless.

3. Driver Magician v3.4 ($29.95)
Found drivers for: Audio, Chipset, LAN, SmartCard Reader, Video, Wireless.

4. Driver Agent v2.2009.2.11 ($29.95)
Found drivers for: Audio, LAN, Mass Storage, SM Bus, Video, Wireless.

5. Driver Updater Pro v2.2.8.0 ($29.95)
Found drivers for: Audio, LAN, SM Bus, Video, Wireless

6. Driver Genius Professional v8.0.0.316 ($29.95)
Found drivers for: Network

7. ParetoLogic DriverCure v1.1 ($29.95)
Unable to detect unknown device drivers.

8. Driver Checker v2.7 ($29.95)
Unable to detect unknown device drivers

9. Driver Robot v1.0 ($29.95)
Unable to detect unknown device drivers

10. DriverGuide Toolkit v2.1.45 ($19.95)
This tool is very weird. On the test laptop that doesn’t have a single driver installed, it ONLY display a list of 11 unknown devices. When searching for updates, it found a total of 17 updates but there is no DOWNLOAD button to download the driver. However when I tested it on another XP computer that has all drivers installed, it worked as normal.

11. RadarSync 2009 v2.0.0.7 (Freeware)
Unable to detect unknown device drivers

12. DriverMax v4.91 (Freeware)
Found drivers for: Audio, Chipset, LAN, Modem, SM Bus, Texas Instrument PCMCIA, Wireless

From what I found out, there is NOT a single software including the paid ones that can identify all unknown devices. Driver Detective performed the best by detecting 8 out of 10. Best part is it can even detect the model of my Acer laptop! You should also take note of DriverMax, a free software for looking the latest driver did pretty well by finding 7 out of 10! The only thing that I didn’t like about DriverMax is you must first obtain a free license code by registering an account.

Most of the paid software above cost $29.95 and all of them allows you to “scan” for free during the trial period but you CANNOT download the drivers. There are keygens and cracks for most of it but don’t ask me where to get it (Google is your best friend).

If XP has a working default driver for your network card, then you can just go ahead and use the software to scan for updated drivers. If not, you will need to find a way to get a temporary internet connection (built-in modem to dial up to your ISP, wireless broadband, wired broadband via USB DSL modem) and use the software above to find and download the network ethernet driver first. Once you got your network card working, you can now use your fast broadband to download the rest.

Tip: You can also try going to Microsoft Windows Update to find for drivers. It only manage to find a driver for my wireless card, hopefully it can find more for your computer.

Most probably you’re here because you got the error message “Savedump.exe – Entry Point Not Found, The procedure entry point SymSetSymWithAddr64 could not be located in the dynamic link library DBGHELP.dll” whenever you boot up Windows.

There’s no way of knowing how did the problem starts because some people got it after installing Media Center, some after installing Pinnacle Studio, and some even after installing Internet Explorer! But I do know that this is caused by installing some application in Windows.

Your computer will still work as normal but then it’s annoying to see the message every time you start up your computer. Here’s how to fix the problem to prevent the error window from showing whenever you startup Windows.


Most probably the DBGHELP.dll file located at C:\Windows\System32 is corrupted or outdated. Replacing the DBGHELP.dll with a good one usually fixes the problem. There are a few ways to restore DBGHELP.dll.

1. Go to C:\WINDOWS\system32\dllcache and copy the DBGHELP.dll to system32 folder.

2. If you have Windows CD, assuming that your CD/DVD drive is D, copy DBGHELP.dll from D:\i386 folder to Windows\System32 folder overwriting the old one.

3. If you can’t find DBGHELP.dll in dllcache folder and you don’t have a Windows CD, you can download DBGHELP.dll from DLL-Files.

Hope this solution will help you get rid of the nagging SymsetSymWithAddr64 Not Located in DBGHELP.dll error message whenever your computer is booted up.

FTP client software are used to connect to FTP server and to upload files or folders to the server. When you sign up for a webhosting package, normally they would provide you with a FTP login information for you to upload your website to their server. It is very important to keep your FTP username and password safe because if it falls into the wrong hands, they can embed malicious scripts to your website infecting your visitors. Other than that, they can also delete your website and upload a single index HTML file to show that the site has been defaced or hacked.

Unfortunately FTP is not safe at all. First of all, FTP credentials are transferred in clear text and you can see the username and password by using a packet sniffer. SFTP solves this problem but it is not very commonly installed on webservers. If your webserver has SFTP, I suggest you to use it. The next thing to worry is how securely FTP client software store your FTP password? If you didn’t know, FileZilla, one of the most popular free FTP client software saves your FTP login information to sitemanager.xml and recentservers.xml in clear text. Even if you use commercial paid FTP client software such as SmartFTP which encrypts your FTP password, it is still not very safe because there are recovery software that can decrypt the encrypted password.


Most of the time a FTP password recovery software or a trojan is programmed to instantly recover passwords. This is done by looking in the registry to find if a FTP software is installed, then decrypt and reveal the FTP login information. Here is one example on FileZilla to help you understand better. I downloaded the installer and ran the setup. During installation I am prompted to choose the install location. Even if I changed the default install location, password recovery software can still find it because the registry reveals where FileZilla is installed!

The Windows registry reveals the location of where FileZilla is installed.

A FTP password recovery software managed to locate FileZilla even if it is installed in a non-default location, and reveals the password.

One way to ensure that you are safe from such password recovery software is to use a “portable” version of FTP client software. There is a FileZilla Portable that can be downloaded from PortableApps. A portable version of FileZilla does not write any information to the Windows registry, hence password recovery software won’t know that FileZilla is installed.

The FTP password recovery software did not find any FTP password on my computer when I am using a portable version of FileZilla.

This is still not really safe yet because it is possible that a password recovery software has a file searching feature which scans the whole hard drive for possible files containing FTP passwords. A good way to protect your FTP password further is to save the portable FTP client software in TrueCrypt encrypted container. You can refer to my previous article on how to create a TrueCrypt container and stop at step 12.

So sum it up:

1. Use SFTP if possible
2. Use portable FTP clients
3. Save the portable FTP client in TrueCrypt encrypted container

I am still around and been busy testing out a lot of stuff. One of the things which I’ve tested and noticed is that when you install Norton 2010, it also automatically installs plugins to Firefox. If you have Norton Antivirus 2010, you should have a plugin called Norton IPS 2.0 and if you have Norton Internet Security 2010, it also comes with Norton IPS 2.0 together with Norton Toolbar 4.5. The IPS plugin is the Norton Intrusion Prevention System which guards against malware being delivered to your system via an exploit of a software vulnerability. The Firefox add-on specifically looks for attacks using security holes that may exist in the browser. This feature is not really essential because other functions of Norton will be able to deal with any malware that tries to run, regardless of its method of installation.

Sometimes we have too many things going on in Firefox and we don’t need extra those extra plugins. Unfortunately you cannot easily uninstall both Norton IPS and Norton Toolbar plugins by clicking the Uninstall button because it is disabled or grayed out. If you’ve searched around, most of the methods to remove the Norton plugins is by deleting the extension folders but that doesn’t work in the latest Norton 2010 products. Here is how to remove the Norton IPS 2.0 and Norton Toolbar 4.5 from the latest Firefox 3.6.


The easiest method to remove the 2 Norton Firefox plugin is to simply disable them from Firefox add-ons window. Go to Tools > Add-ons, select the plugins to highlight it and then click the Disable button. Trust me, by doing that the 2 plugins will not be loaded into Firefox. I know this because Process Hacker and AppMonitor tells me so.

From Process Hacker, I get to know that this file IPSFFPl.dll is used for Norton IPS 2.0 and coFFPlgn.dll is used for Norton Toolbar 4.5. Just run Process Hacker, double click on the firefox.exe process to open the process properties and go to the Modules tab. After disabling both Norton plugins from Firefox, this 2 files is no longer shown in the Modules tab, which means it is not loaded and doesn’t take up extra system resource.

And as for AppTimer, it is a tool to measure and benchmark the start-up time of Firefox on my system. I ran 10 execution to get the average startup time of Firefox and compared the results. With Norton IPS 2.0 and Norton Toolbar 4.5 “enabled”, the average Firefox startup time is 0.95925. But when I disabled both plugins, the startup time drops to 0.86703.

If you still don’t like to see both Norton plugins in Firefox, here’s how to remove it from the list.

1. Run Firefox, go to Tools > Add-ons. Select Norton IPS 2.0 and click Disable. Then select Norton Toolbar 4.5 and click Disable.

2. Close Firefox.

3. Simultaneously press Win+R to bring up the run window and type: %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles and hit the Enter key.

4. You should see your Firefox profile folder that has random letters and numbers followed by .default. Double click on that folder and open the extensions.rdf file with a text editor such as Notepad++ or Wordpad.

5. Delete this 2 lines that has the following number and save the file.

{BBDA0591-3099-440a-AA10-41764D9DB4DB}
{2D3F3651-74B9-4795-BDEC-6DA2F431CB62}

Try launching Firefox now and you should not be seeing Norton IPS 2.0 and Norton Toolbar 4.5 in the Firefox add-ons window. If you still do, that means you did something wrong. If you’re stuck at step 3, what you can do is search for the file extensions.rdf and open it with a text editor. For your information, the IPSFFPl.dll file that is responsible for the Norton IPS is protected by Norton 2010 and you cannot delete or rename it. Even if you managed to delete it in Safe Mode, the files will be automatically re-created.

If you have Norton 360 v3 installed or Norton 2009 installed, you can easily uninstall the Norton IPS 1.0 and Norton Toolbar 3.7 by deleting this 2 files {7BA52691-1876-45ce-9EE6-54BCB3B04BBC} and {8545daff-ad1e-493f-a37e-eed1ac79682b} from C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\extensions\