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About a week later I managed to get the original main hard drive data back so the world was looking better but I would still like some of the data off of the external backup. The external was placed on a shelf for a better day (and to be safe from getting thrown through the drywall).Now enter last week and yet another hard drive debacle. This time it was my own fault because I was wiping some old hard drives for a friend and forgot to take the wiping CD out before I attached my own hard drive to the system and well you can figure out the rest. The wiping software is BCWipePD (http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/) which does not play around and what is wiped is gone. By the time that I realized my hard drive was in the process of being destroyed and I hit the power, about 7 seconds had passed and around 200 Mb was gone. Well of course that first part of the hard drive holds all the partition tables and a lot of NTFS data so there is absolutely no hope of getting the data back unless you do some raw data reading. Once again I was in a pickle because I had backed up most of my important data through Jungle Disk (https://www.jungledisk.com/) but I didn’t have my music backed up.I first tried PC INSPECTOR File Recovery and then ARAX Disk Doctor but it was still the POS that I remembered so it was now 0 and 2. I once again started searching and happened on yet another commercial hard drive recovery solution. This time I did more due diligence and decided to plop down the money for EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Professional 4.3.6. As before the trial version showed the data to be recovered but I would have to get the full version, this time $90. I had to have my data back once again so I tried it and this time it worked! Not only did it get the data back it was easier to use and I had absolutely no problems at all. After I was finished with the current problem I attached the previous external hard drive and it got all of that data also! EASEUS is 2 for 2. I haven’t played around with any other features in EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Professional 4.3.6 but I haven’t had to, it worked the first time and I am a satisfied customer.In the end all I want is to have my $40 back from ARAX but they have a very difficult and insecure refund process so for fear of credit card fraud they get to keep my $40 this time. In return I get to have $40 worth of fun smearing their name across the Internet and hopefully someone will read this before buying their product. On the other hand I did end up finding a great product called EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Professional 4.3.6. It worked and that’s all that I have to say. If you find yourself in the same situation as me then you should buy their product.P.S. Remember to always remove that wiping CD before you reboot

To this point I tried Spinrite (https://www.grc.com/intro.htm) and several partition table editing tools with no luck. I then decided that it was time for more dramatic action and started downloading data recovery tools. The best resource I found was a site dedicated to free software called The Free Country (http://www.thefreecountry.com/) and specifically a page devoted to hard drive data recovery (http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/datarecovery.shtml). I tried every single tool on the page with only slight luck. Most programs done nothing more than looked in the Recycle Bin but a few actually went a step further and performed a raw data scan on the physical disk and not just what popped up in Windows. The best one that I found was PC INSPECTOR File Recovery (http://www.pcinspector.de/default.htm). It looked at the BIOS to see what hard drives were attached and then performed a lengthy raw data scan looking for corrupt partitions. I was able to get about 50% of my data back but there was a problem with deep file structures and I could not get anything back more than about three directories deep. I exhausted all of my free options and I really needed that data back so I started looking for commercial products. For one reason or another I downloaded ARAX Disk Doctor 2.2 from http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/. It was nice looking and ran a scan similar to PC INSPECTOR File Recovery and declared that it found all of the data and all that it need was me to pay them for the full product. I usually donât engage in such acts but I need my data so I paid them and then eagerly awaited my data. After entering the registration code another scan was performed (around 2 hours) and the same data found message appeared. I then clicked OK and the program crashed. Perhaps this was a one time incident but I soon found that this is one of the buggiest programs that I have ever seen and after beating my head against the wall for about a day I gave up. I soon asked for a refund and hit the red tape big time. After several days of emailing logs they finally gave up and sent me the form to fill out for a refund. There were two forms. One declaring that I have destroyed all copies of the program and the second asking me for my complete credit card information. Both forms were to be faxed back to them. Besides more red tape, I did see a slight problem with providing my complete credit card information on a piece of paper and then faxing it back to complete strangers. And yes faxing it was the only option. Keep my $40, I would like to keep myself save from credit card fraud.

Here is some background to my rant. About a month ago my main hard crashed which is not that bad because I have an external backup and all that is lost is time. (If you have followed some of my previous posts then this is the same time that I installed Vista for the first time but that is a separate rant.) This crash was particularly painful because this was the 6th Western Digital hard drive that went south on me within the past two years and this was actually one of the replacements that I got from Western Digital. The crash happened almost exactly one year after I installed it and the previous crash (also WD) was also almost one year before that. Many years ago I was caught up in the IBM “DeathStar” line of hard drives (http://www.pcworld.com/article/125772/worst_products_ever.html?page=5) and thus I swore off IBM for all time. I have now done the same to Western Digital. Several years ago Western Digital was a very respected name but lately the quality has gone down and I am solely on Seagate. I suppose there is a reason that WD hard drives are always $10-$20 cheaper at Best Buy.Here comes the second round to make this particular week in my life really bad. The backup that I referenced earlier, well it died exactly one day after the main hard drive crash. The external drive was a hybrid CD –hard drive contraption from AcomData (http://www.acomdata.com/rg-erdr.php?_rpo=t) that I purchased from CompUSA during their closing. It served me well for some time but I was always annoyed at the CD partition that also popped up when the drive was attached. I knew from the beginning that the CD was emulated in hardware by having a separate partition on the external hard drive. I tried everything I knew to get the external drive working because at this point I did have more than time to loose from a dual hard drive crash. When I opened the enclosure I found guess what; A Western Digital hard drive. At this point I was in a really foul mood and the newly discovered hard drive very nearly went through the drywall in my room. After calming down I deduced that the hard drive itself was not to blame but there was a problem with the hardware controller. Long story short, the hard drive and data were apparently OK but I couldn’t get to it because of the special CD partition at the beginning and the partition tables were laid out in a proprietary format. The data was NTFS but the partition entry describing the partition type was completely out in left field.

Here is a short review from a recent tragedy that I encountered from the loss of a hard drive. After an extensive search for free programs I landed upon two different commercial products and here is the review for them both. The reason for this review is to get some frustration out about the looser because I feel that I am out a good chunk of money and I figure this will help me feel better. Good EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Professional 4.3.6 http://www.easeus.com/ $89.95 USD Worked first time and I was actually impressed. Bad ARAX Disk Doctor 2.2 http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ $39.95 USD Buggy and crashed. Never got a single bit of data from this software. Tried to get a refund but I had to fax my credit card number on a form they emailed me so I decided against it. Bad Western Digital consumer hard drives https://www.wdc.com/ At one time my hard drive fleet was comprised entirely of Western Digital but something has happened in the past few years and I have had 6 of them die almost exactly one year after purchase.

Agreed. By having the password in the HTML, anyone who looks at the HTML will know the password. Even if you encrypt the password the encryption key will have to be stored in the HTML and it is only a matter of time before the password is found. The best you could hope for here is security through obscurity.

I have no firm proof but my guess is that no you canât make UAC pop up for arbitrary reasons. The reason is that UAC is a protected function and can in theory only be accessed by the operating system. When the UAC prompt is displayed you are actually seeing a different protected desktop that only has a screen capture of your user desktop underneath. The UAC prompt is displayed at some of the lowest levels of Vista and is currently unavailable to the average programmer. The reason is that if I were a malware author that wanted to get my software installed on a UAC protected system, I would just change some registry settings before I started the install. (This is a famous problem with the SP2 firewall because you can simply add a rule by adding a registry entry.) If that didnât work I would then make a program that took control of the mouse and then move the mouse to the UAC accept button and programmatically click the button thus defeating the entire concept of UAC. For this reason UAC is a very protected entity and only the operating system has access to monkeying around with it. If there were some way to add or remove UAC features it would be in the group policy settings which you can get to from the Administrative Tools or from MMC. Group policy is usually used on corporate domains but you can set most of the settings for a stand alone machine. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download

It could also be a hard drive problem but in any case I agree that is it rare. If you didn’t know, Service Pack 3 is out now and you might want to try upgrading straight to SP3. According to the SP3 website (http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/), Service Pack 2 is not a requirement.

I would also like suggestions on the best current HTML WYSIWYG program. I have been using FrontPage 2003 for many years now but since I upgraded to Vista I’m having problems. When I try to publish any files to Xisto I get the following error:An error occurred accessing your Windows SharePoint Services files. Authors – if authoring against a Web Server, please contact the Webmaster for the server’s Web site. Webmasters – please see the server’s application event log for more details.I have searched Google and found no specific solution besides check your event logs which in this case doesn’t really help me that much. I am fairly certain the problem is on my end and considering Microsoft has discontinued the FrontPage line of products, its time for me to look at another solution. There are only two features that I really like in FrontPage, ease of use and the counter. If I go off of FrontPage then I will have to create manual CGI counters which at this point I am not looking forward to, but will do. I also like the simple editor. I’m not after very powerful editing but I would like built in publishing.

I do have a small update feature that checks to see if you are running the latest version of YCC Yahoo Bot Maker. I have tried the auto updating feature in the past but it turned nasty really quick because you have to have a second program to do the actual updating. I also thought of having the same name for all the executables and removing the versioning but I like to keep the versions separate and it will not solve the current issue because all of the problem sites are still referencing the file name with the outdated version.I also quickly tried the suggestion above and unfortunately it did not work. It still gave the same 500 Internal Error message. I didn’t fool with it very much because I wasn’t on my main machine at the time.

Well here is the back story. From ycoderscookbook.com I publish several freeware programs for Yahoo! Messenger. Because my programs are very dependant on the Yahoo! servers, anytime they change something on their backend I have to make an update and republish the new binary. In order to get the word out more about my programs I also routinely publish on shareware and freeware sites via a PAD file (http://pad.asp-software.org/). The problem is that many of the third-party software sites are sometimes not very quick to update their databases. They will snap up your program in a matter of days but they will never update the listing after that even if you ask. The PAD system allows the publisher to remove or update any software but most of the sites that pick up software are just huge ad farms and they donât care what happens to a program once it has been added to the system. To this day I get download requests for software that has gone through five revisions and is 3 years out of date. When you get just as many requests for outdated software as current software then it can really hurt your image. Here is a real world example that I just pulled off of my logs (sadly it was the first entry). The first entry is outdated and the second is the current. ⢠http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Bot Maker 1.1.rar ⢠http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Yahoo Bot Maker 2.0.zip To prevent the first file from getting a 404 message I would like to internally redirect the first file to the second file

If you are running a Windows machine then the latest version of WinRAR (http://www.rarlab.com/) will extract ISO files. No one should be without WinRAR

You should have an abundant selection when it comes to webmail. Right now horde, Squirrel Mail, and Round Cube are all available interfaces to your webmail. I too have to admit that Xisto has pissed me off in the past but it is still hard to beat the deal that they offer. First of all I get to post about what I enjoy talking about and second, the hosting options are very complete.

I just received a very weird message when I logged into Messenger today. It said “Congratulations, you are a Power User!” The pop-up was in its separate window similar to the annoying Insider and had a Learn More, Choose Your Icon, and No Thanks button (the Learn More button didn’t work). After doing a quick Google search (https://help.yahoo.com/kb/account) (http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/) I found that this thing does really exist and wasn’t some ad pop-up that somehow got past my defenses. Here are a few of the “benefits”:• A special online icon• A Power Users Yahoo! Group• Better live customer support This is the first time that I have heard of such a thing and I will have to investigate the possibilities. I am assuming that the non-standard icons and the pop-up box are built into Messenger 9. If they are not then it opens up new possibilities for code execution and at the very least I will have to see how this changes the YMSG protocol. I would like your input to see if this has been around for awhile and if anyone else has additional information.

It has been about a week since I have installed Vista and I have some updates and more comments. Only a few days ago it was still a toss up to whether or not I was going to reinstall Windows XP. Then I was slightly more in favor of XP. Now it is still a toss up but the advantage has gone to Vista for staying. I have become a little bit more familiar with the system and some of my personal habits have changed so it is not as dreadful as it once was. CAN NOT CHANGE ATTRIBUTES FROM READ ONLY I have managed to move this to the resolved category. The knowledge base article at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/326549 does a good job at describing the problem. Basically Vista and XP both set the read-only attribute on folders and I went back to a XP machine to verify this. When in the context of a folder, read-only means nothing and is only a signal to the OS that the folder customization should be shown (i.e. those annoying .ini files that makes your Pictures folder show thumbnails and not straight file listings). While the default folder behavior is the same, the default file behavior is not. Vista will by default put a read-only attribute on all files where XP did not and this is the root cause of my problem. I tested this and found that when removing the read-only attribute from a folder, all read-only file attributes were cleared. The drive that I was having this particular problem came from my previous system so the owner of all the files was the old XP account so I also took ownership of the files. In the end the problem has been solved even though I consider it poor communication on Microsoftâs part. Here is in-depth explanation of what I done. 1. Right click the folder in question and select properties. 2. Click the security tab. 3. Click Advanced 4. Click Edit 5. Using the permissions dialogues, set USERS and any other applicable accounts to Full Control. 6. Delete the old XP account which is a Windows SSID. 7. Uncheck âInherit from parentâŚâ 8. Check âReplace permissionsâŚâ 9. Acknowledge all open dialogue boxes and wait for the permissions to be set. I had an entire hard drive to set so it took a few hours. The read-only attribute for the folders will remain but now you will at least be able to edit your files.

This is a sad tale of a man and his machine that would not start again. The story continues with a sorted affair between two operating systems and a battle to win the love of this man’s heart.My problems began last weekend when I started my computer after it had been off from the previous night. Everything went normally throughout the POST but once Windows XP started I heard the dreaded clicking from the hard drive. After several reboots and a Spinrite diagnostic I gave up and called the time of death around three in the afternoon. This is not all bad because I had the drive fully backed up with no loss of data. Actually this may be an opportunity to try something new.A few months back I purchased an MSDN subscription from Microsoft and I had access to all of the latest operating systems, including Vista. This would be an excellent time to start fresh and try out Vista at the same time. After all, Vista has been on market for well over a year and I have never had the opportunity to introduce myself. This should be fun…EDITORS NOTE: Anywhere you see a bold statement at the beginning of a paragraph; I would appreciate help if you have a solution to this particular problem. Now, on to the story.After I installed a new Seagate hard drive to replace the broken Western Digital (WD), I quickly dove into the Windows Vista install process. Everything went great and I was surprised at how fast and clean the process went since I had never installed Vista before. After the installation was complete and the machine rebooted for the last time, I was also impressed at the boot speed. Everything appeared to be fantastic.I logged on for the first time and I have to say that I was impressed. Vista really does look good. My first annoyance was the start menu and no icons on the desktop. I soon remedied that problem by switching almost everything to the classic view. It took a few minutes to discover all of the new hiding places for settings but I managed as most of the control panel structure follows XP’s lead.IE STOPS RESPONDING ALL THE TIMEAnd then the first problem hit me straight in the noise. Internet Explorer starts half the time and stops responding after opening the other half. On a brand new install with no programs loaded this was a real irritation. Of course when this happens, you can’t just close the window, it takes a minute for it to respond and then ask if it should be restarted. In that same amount of time I could have already killed the process and opened a new window myself. Also for some reason it takes 10 seconds for the window to finally shut. It looks like this is certainly one thing they should have gotten right. I ended up downloading FireFox just to get on the Internet.WHERE IS MY UP ARROW?My next battle started during the mass software installation phase. To be quite honest I have my fair share of programs that I don’t always use frequently but when I need them I need them. This phase can take almost a day in itself. I noticed that of course the Windows Explorer had changed but I didn’t notice the missing up arrow or the go to parent directory button. XP has always had the back arrow but I never used it because I know where I am in the directory structure and shortcuts can break where you want to go. For instance, you follow a shortcut to My Documents and then want to go to the Users folder, just hit the up arrow. But now it is missing…UNABLE TO KILL PROCESSESAfter messing with Vista for about a day I started having application problems (besides of course IE which is still not working at this point). Apparently a few of my XP programs do not like to play nice with Vista. The main offenders are FireFox, plink (party of the Putty suite for SSH), and eMule. I have heard that power user don’t especially like Vista but before I started I chalked this up to just unfamiliarity of the operating system. After all a new operating system plays by different rules and it take some time to learn the rules. A new user, even a seasoned veteran, can get frustrated by not being able to do things as quickly as they did before. This next problem just made my head split open and a little demon pop out. I am normally a very quite person but I let out a loud verbal obscenity that all the neighbors could hear.FireFox had stopped working so I quickly opened up Task Manager and killed the process. The problem was that the process would not die! WTF? I tried several more times with no luck. I tried to restart FireFox and it would not open because another process by the same name was already open. It is understandable that the programmers behind FireFox wouldn’t want two process open at the same time but what happens when you can’t get rid of the first one? Perhaps this was a onetime bug and I restarted the computer. It came back up and I quickly downloaded Process Explorer from SysInternals. After a few minutes, sure enough FireFox had frozen again and I went to Process Explorer this time and had the same result. I then opened an Administrator command prompt and nothing once again happened. I restarted once again and started searching the web. I still haven’t found a definitive answer but some of Microsoft’s own posts suggest that this is the way Vista works and you have to live with it.Same song different verse. I opened plink in a command window and connected to one of my SSH servers. Now I love plink because it gets the job done and all I have to do is launch a batch file to get a fairly complication connection started. To be fair it has always been buggy and would crash under XP, sometimes very unexpectedly. I would simply start the session again and keep SSHing away. Near the end of my application reload I needed some files from the SSH server so I started the batch file and started happily downloading. After around 30 minutes, plink crapped out on me but as usually I was not surprised. I double clicked on the batch file to reestablish the connection but nothing happened. Now this is odd. I opened Task Manager (I should have learned my lesson by now shouldn’t I) and saw that plink was still running. Please refer to the above paragraph because it was like a bad dream that kept coming back. This time I had another nasty surprise; apparently the entire networking stack was also involved/crashed and I had no network connectivity. WTF! Restart the computer and repeat.Some song different verse. I opened eMule and started downloading a few “applications.” eMule crashed and guess what? I couldn’t kill the process. After experiencing this “feature” one too many times, I think Microsoft is STUPID for making this change. Now I will have to admit that the system never crashed during any of these application crashes and the GUI remained responsive at all times, which is the ultimate goal of any operating system, but what use is this if you have to restart the entire machine just because one application has crashed? After all I am the Administrator and I should have enough brain power when to decide to kill a process. So what if I want to kill a process? I may not have a good reason. Perhaps it looked at me wrong and I shoot the little SOB. It is still my box and I demand control over my own machine, otherwise I will have to restart every 45 minutes.CAN NOT CHANGE ATTRIBUTES FROM READ ONLYThis is another what were they thinking? Apparently all of the folders on your hard drive are set to read only. I found out about this little nugget of goodness when I attached a removable hard drive to my machine and tried to change some files on it. It is not unusual for the operating system to set the files and folders to read only but I can’t permanently change the attributes. I open the properties to change the attributes and the UAC prompt pops up. I say yes and then remove the read only attribute. I close the property window, reopen it and the !@#$ thing is still read only!UACThis actually isn’t a problem. I commend Microsoft on this change and I gladly accept the extra feedback from the operating system. Now only if moving or deleting items from the start menu wasn’t a protected operation…SHUTDOWN PROGRAMSSometimes you have a program that needs to run right before Windows shuts down. Interestingly enough this is a common operation and Microsoft has (apparently in the past) made API hooks and calls built into Windows to allow such things to work. What I am talking about is a wiping program that will clear your recycle bin, temp folders, and Internet Explorer cache before the machine is shutdown. It just so happens that I have found a great one that works wonderfully under XP but doesn’t exactly like Vista. The problem is that when the wiping is under way just before Windows Vista logs off the user, Vista detects it as a hung program and tries to kill the process. This is of course not what you want to happen and quickly leads to a BSOD. The next time you start the machine, Vista has done you a favor and removed the application from the shutdown order, grrrrrr.What puzzles me is that there is a well known time during shutdown that a program can request to remain open. The program will send an API command to Windows saying, yes I know you want to shut down but give me a few more moments, I will tell you when I am done. Under XP this works as expected with the wiping utility but Vista apparently ignores this request. I am happy to say that I have a wide smile on my face every time this happens and I am looking at a BSOD. Blue really does bring out the color of my eyes.CONCLUSIONIf you have made it this far then I commend you and hopefully you had a small laugh at my expense. It is always fun to laugh at others. In all honestly if you have any suggestions to the above problems that I am having please let me know. I have already given up on this install and I will be starting from scratch once I get some pressing work done. Perhaps I will take it much slower next time and isolate some of the problems. If that doesn’t work then I am going back to Windows XP and perhaps never install Vista again. I really like Vista, it is beautiful, and just a fast as XP. Apparently the down side is that Microsoft thinks every user has had half their brain removed due to a lobotomy or horrific car crash. If I decide that I want to kill a process then damn it I should be able to.I would seriously love to continue this conversation but it is getting hard to see the screen. eMule has crashed once again and is covering up half of the Microsoft Word document that I am typing in. IE is also crashed and I can see its outline behind this window also. Have fun while I restart once again (looks at watch, yep it’s been about 45 minutes)…

I believe what you are talking about is one of the hydrogen based cars. Searching Google for âwater based carâ will get several interesting results including those clearly aimed at taking your money and not you for a ride. One that appears somewhat creditable is at Engadget (https://www.engadget.com/2008/06/13/genepax-shows-off-water-powered-fuel-cell-vehicle/).The bottom line is that this technology is not impossible but up until now has been impractical because converting the hydrogen from water has been more costly and inefficient than gasoline. In fact, the space shuttle carries little to no water because it is so heavy. What they do have is two massive oxygen and hydrogen tanks and they make the water while in space. The reverse is also possible (making hydrogen and oxygen from water) and has been know since the invention of electricity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water) and (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page Electrolysis). Another obstacle to hydrogen cars is the combustible nature of hydrogen. Gasoline is also flammable but it doesnât hold a candle to hydrogen, especially when under pressure.There may be a day when we run our cars on water or more specifically hydrogen but that day is still many (perhaps 10-30) years away. Currently it takes more energy to create the hydrogen then consuming it produces. Until the production of hydrogen drops, water cars will be impractical.

Being able to see the process only in the task manager is the entire point of this application. You can change the way the application shows itself by modifying the STARTUP_INFO structure (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms686331(VS.85).aspx). The two fields that you should look at is dwFlags and wShowWindow. My original problem was getting a process to start under the current user context from a Windows service that was running under the SYSTEM account. The SYSTEM account is the all powerful account that Windows runs in and is even more powerful than administrator but has its limitations. Each user on a system gets a screen session when they login. If I login as Joe then I get my own screen (desktop) and any application that I open will be rendered on that screen. I can only see the windows on my screen and no one else can see my screen. SYSTEM on the other hand is not assigned a screen and if an application is opened by SYSTEM then the current user can not see the window. An example of this is creating a Windows service running under SYSTEM that opens Notepad. Once the service is started you will see the Notepad process in Task Manager but the current user will not see the Notepad window because it was not opened on their screen. The purpose of CreateProcessAsUser.exe is to open a process under the current user so they are able to see the Notepad window. To alter the above example to make Notepad visible, call CreateProcessAsUser.exe with process.start and add the appropriate command line arguments. I needed CreateProcessAsUser.exe to create a process without a visible window yet still be in the current userâs context. As demonstrated in the original thread, it is not possible to do this in the .NET Framework because of a deliberate(?) omission to the .NET API.

In the HTTP 1.1 specification there are actually 40 different response codes that you might receive (http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/). Most you will never encounter. The codes are broken down further by the following: 1xx â Informational 2xx â Success 3xx â Redirection 4xx â Client Error 5xx â Server Error The complete list follows and the section number is the HTTP specification section.

The odd thing is it looks like these errors are intermittent. The errors were an issue yesterday but cleared up late yesterday afternoon. I checked my site again this morning and they are back.

I still donât know whatâs Iâm doing wrong. I placed the following .htaccess file in the Files directory and I get the following message The contents of the .htaccess file are Should I be adding this to the .htaccess file in the root directory instead of the subdirectory?

It looks like this isnât an isolated incident because Iâm getting the exact same error. I noticed that the Xisto page was down earlier due to a similar SQL error so I assume something bad happened on the backend. My entire blog is down and the private message feature in phpBB is also down. Oddly enough the rest of phpBB appears to be working. According to cpanel I have 116.76/500 MB disk usage and the largest database is for phpBB at 2.72 MB. When navigating to phpMyAdmin I get the following error.

I also have to agree that open protocols are the way to go but I have the feeling that Yahoo! will fight tooth and nail to keep theirs closed.

Sounds suspicious to me. We all know that adding third party browser search bars never lead to spyware infested machines.

If I had to take a shot in the dark I would guess the program is ACDSee. Starting a few versions ago they have implemented a very annoying database system that tries to index all the pictures (and who knows what else) on your hard drive. I like ACDSee enough that I put up with this but I make it a point to disable as much database functionality as possible which mostly involves manually excluding indexing on the hard drives. There is no option to just turn off the database which severely annoys me.Another thing that makes me think of this program is an incident where I set the database directory to a removable drive. Anytime I started ACDsee and the drive was not mounted, the program would crash and not allow me to view photos. There was no way to override this behavior which I consider poor programming design.

While Yahoo! was off fighting Microsoft, they made some deals with Google to put a slightly tainted taste into the merger deal. The most notable one was an ad revenue “trial” where Google would serve the ads on Yahoo! pages in return for a very favorable share of the profit. Over the past week it appears that the trials were very successful and Yahoo! has agreed to a more permanent deal with Google that would continue the deal, pending any anti-trust issues. Mixed up in this agreement is a paragraph that indicates future interoperability between the two IM platforms (https://www.cnet.com/news/google-yahoo-deal-good-news-for-im-but/) (http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/) (http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121366428372879463). In short you may be talking to Google Talk users using Yahoo! Messenger in the future.This will be a great steep towards getting the major players to talk to each other but I’m not sure how Microsoft is going to take this news. Currently Messenger can communicate with MSN users so does this mean that Google Talk users will be able to talk to MSN users? This also opens up the issue of how the two networks will communicate. Google talk uses an open source protocol called XMPP while Yahoo! is closed source.