random neuron misfires

I installed the “Calendar Printing Assistant” for Office 2007 in a VM, and was very impressed with the output. Slick and lots of choices.

I recently upgraded to Office 2010, and have been tinkering with the conversion of my Office 2007 daily usage in a VM to the Office 2010 usage in a VM, but missed the power and flexibility of the Calendar Printing Assistant.

If you Google the tool, you come to this page on Microsoft’s site, which refers to ‘version 4’ of the CPA. Unfortunately, this only works with Office 2007, not Office 2010.

In fact, if you search around some more, you even find posts from Microsoft themselves, saying that it isn’t updated to handle Office 2010 yet.

Being one to never give up, I kept digging, and digging, and digging… and after many searches through Microsoft’s site directly, I found it! The Calendar Printing Assistant for Office 2010 (and Office 2007), “updated” to version 2.0.

Microsoft Calendar Printing Assistant for Microsoft Office 2007 (12.0.6520.3001) MSO (12.0.6520.5000)

I just verified that it does indeed install and work on Office 2010, without any issues at all… other than some GUI artifacts (probably due to some funky VMware video drivers for Windows 7, more than CPA itself).

Enjoy!

Recently, my Windows 7 laptop started showing the “Search programs and files” Start Menu option was showing bogus search result that looked like this:

I searched around for awhile, and finally stumbled on a site describing the exact fix I was looking for.

In short, you need to perform the following steps to fix this:

1. Open the Registry Editor, but since may not be able to search for it, you’ll have to surf over to C:\Windows\System32\regedt32.exe and run that, or C:\Windows\regedit.exe.
2. Navigate to the key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderTypes\{EF87B4CB-F2CE-4785-8658-4CA6C63E38C6}\TopViews\{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}
3. Locate the value: GroupBy in the right-hand pane.
4. Change the value to System.StartMenu.Group
5. Launch Task Manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc) and kill the explorer.exe process you’ll see running.
6. Inside of Task Manager, go to File | New Task (Run…)
7. Type “explorer.exe” and click Ok.

Nobody seems to know why this happens, and it happens randomly. It was discussed in the Microsoft forums, but there was no fix therein.

This is yet another reason why I hate Microsoft Windows. Random behavior in a computer is never acceptable.