Outlook Repeating Alarm for Newly Received Email

 

VBA code was written to make the arrival of new emails more obvious with a more intrusive message box and continuous sound (Link->Outlook Repeating Alarm for New Email). The message box and sound will continue until the message box is acknowledged or times out. An alarm for the email can be set to repeat from either the message box or by letting the message box time out. The repeating sound and message box can be dismissed in the message box or by taking action to handle the email (deleting, moving or reading the email). Two sets of code are listed. “CODE MINIMAL” contains few features. “CODE” contains has more features that are selectable by altering the code. This was written for Outlook 2007 running in Windows 10. The message box time out uses an undocumented feature in the user32 library (alias MessageBoxTimeoutA). It has been available since Windows 7 but there is not guarantee it will remain available.

Windows Notepad Icons Become White Blank Looking Document Page

In Windows 10, files and shortcuts that had a Notepad icon changed and the new icon appeared to be a blank white document page. For my computer, this was notice around 01/10/21. The “Site” (https://www.winhelponline.com/blog/change-default-icon-file-type-windows/) was helpful used in finding a resolution. The resolution fixing the problem was to edit the registry value from HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\txtfile\DefaultIcon\%SystemRoot%\system32\imageres.dll,-102 to %SystemRoot%\system32\notepad.exe,-2. The DefaultIcon and the file it is located in have changed with versions of Windows. In some of the newer versions of the files referenced for the default icon, the icon referenced was not present. Associating applications to file extensions in Windows 10 settings is immediate but is not necessarily reflected in some registry key values after a registry refresh or reboot. The value in the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.txt\UserChoice\ProgId\ on my computer was textfile. This value was txtfile on the “Site”. This entry could not be edited because of permissions so it could not have been inadvertently changed during the attempts to fix the problem. The permissions were changed and it was edited to txtfile. A more detailed discussion is at (Link->)White Icon Blog Page

 

Update to Windows Performance Counter Event Errors

After installing all the performance counters that could be found for the services listed by lodctr /Q, a event viewer logged a couple of events associated with the performance counters.  This was used as an opportunity to run lodctr /R to check its affect on installed counters.  Some counter were lost. This is listed under Update 20190122 in LINK-> Performance Counter Event Errors

Fixing Windows Performance Counter Event Errors

Windows performance counters can cause event errors like 1008, 1023, 2001 and 8317.  Information on fixing them is fragmented and the easily found reference information on using the Lodctr command to fix them is limited in depth. Link-> Performance Counter Event Errors discusses how Lodctr was used to resolve the events and items that may have caused others to have less success with the command.