Weird Windows Problems
May 1, 2006
People ask the Brothers why they have started to use Apple computers; the Brothers own both an iBook and a Mac Mini, in addition to three Windows-based computers. And they really prefer to use the Apple computers—if it wasn’t that the Brothers need to know what is happening with Windows they would be banished. Well this week’s adventure with a weird Windows problem may provide the best illustration.
Recently the Brothers upgraded their main Windows computer by uninstalling ‘Visual Studio .Net Professional, Version 2003’, and installing the latest version, ‘Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition’. Note that the Brothers didn’t even consider upgrading, they completely uninstalled the first version, and then reinstalled the latest version because changing developer tools is no small task and touches lots of components and other applications on Windows.
At first things seemed to be working okay, but right around the time the Brothers were making this change, Microsoft released the latest monthly updates to patch vulnerabilities in its software. This means that there were two events that changed the computer, so when weird stuff started happening it made it harder to determine which change was causing the problem—typically when a computer that had been running smoothly goes awry, it relates to the last change.
Not long after upgrading Visual Studio the Brothers went to use Excel. When they clicked on an existing worksheet that they wanted to edit, a dialog box with the title:
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition – ENU
and the message:
Please wait while Windows configures Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition – ENU
popped up instead of the document the Brothers needed to edit.
See how strange Windows truly is: the Brothers are starting Microsoft Office, and for some totally random reason, Visual Studio needs to be configured. Why? Because Microsoft software features ‘Integrated Innovation’, which really means when Microsoft makes a mistake and break one component or feature it breaks several other features at the same time.
As is typical with Microsoft’s poorly written error and informational dialog boxes, the only option available to the Brothers was to press the ‘Cancel’ button. But before the Brothers could even respond to that message, a second one pops up, again with a title that indicates that it to is coming from Visual Studio. This one reads:
Error 1706.An installation package for the product Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition – ENU cannot be found. Try the installation again using a valid copy of the installation package ‘vs_setup.msi’.
And the lack of space between the period after 1706 and the word An is not a mistake at this Web site, it is an error in the way the error message is parsing the error number and the rest of the message.
This time the Brothers only option is to press an ‘OK’ button, but obviously, the situation with Windows, Office, and Visual Studio is anything but okay.
1706 Error Message—Microsoft Corporation Larger view…
Now for some unknown reason, this message popped up each time the Brothers attempted to open either Excel or PowerPoint. For an equally unknown reason, it never occurred when they attempted to open or start Outlook or Word. Go figure—another integrated innovation anomaly.
At this point Teddy is mad at Hershey for updating Visual Studio and breaking Office, and Hershey is telling Teddy he had to because it is hard to get any help or support from Microsoft unless you are running the latest version. The typical support conversation precedes something like this:
- Have you tried rebooting the computer?
- Have you tried reinstalling the program?
- Have you tried reformating your computer and reinstalling Windows?
- Gosh, no one else has reported that, and we cannot reproduce it with the latest version here…
The Brothers did some searches online in the Knowledge Base searching on the keywords ‘1706’ and ‘vs_setup.msi’. There were no matching results for their search. But the Brothers remembered seeing ‘1706’ messages before so they keep searching.
They go to the Windows Knowledge Base and do the same search with the same initial lack of results. They remove the ‘vs_setup.msi’ keyword and now they find two articles that could be related, but after reading them they don’t really help.
They repeat the search again, this time focusing on the Office 2003 Knowledge Base. This time they get more results, and the first item actually seems relevant or at least related:
You receive an ‘Error 1706. Setup cannot find the required files’ error message when you repair or install a feature in Office…
Essentially fixing this problem is going to require either reinstalling Office or reinstalling Visual Studio. Either choice is time consuming and non-trival, and certainly will help the Brothers be extremely productive for several hours while files are being copied and Registry keys are being set.
But the Brothers at this point do what most Windows users do, they press the ‘OK’ and ‘Cancel’ buttons a couple of times, and then the dialogs disappear, and lo-and-behold, Excel (or PowerPoint) works. Or appears to work. Who really knows?
For several days this goes on, and then last Thursday night when they were getting ready to turn the computer off for the night, a message indicated that Windows or Microsoft Update had downloaded a patch, and now Windows was ready to install it before it shutdown.
Friday morning the Brothers start the computer again, and the messages stopped appearing. They could work with Excel and create mind-numbing presentations with PowerPoint. The error messages haven’t appeared again.
Now Microsoft might try to pass this off as an example of how resilient Windows is, it repaired itself. But the reality is something in either the installation of Visual Studio, or the latest patches for security vulnerabilities broke the Brothers computer, and a subsequent patch or repair to one of the previous patches fixed it.
This is why the Mac OS X is such a better eXPerience than Windows XP. These kinds of destabilization or reliability problems just don’t happen on the Mac. Some of it is no doubt due to the fact that installing and removing applications from the Mac is a clean process, that doesn’t install a lot of shared components that may or may not be out of date or incompatible and it doesn’t result in a polluted Registry—a purely Windows concept—that no one understands how to fix and keep running in a stable manner.
Almost every time the Brothers start Windows they wonder what is going to be broken or mysteriously stop working this time. They wonder how much productivity they are going to loose today while they futz around with Windows configuration and settings or reading Knowledge Base articles looking desperately for a clue as to what is broken.
In contrast, when the Brothers start a computer running Mac OS X, they know they can be immediately productive and get down to work.
It’s that simple, or at least, using a computer should be.