Mar
13

Group Policy Not Applied To Remote VPN Users

Problem:  Users logging on to an Active Directory domain across a relatively slow VPN link will unreliably apply group policies.  This article deals with user policies specifically, not computer policies. Solution:  Although the ultimate solution to this problem would be to cure the root cause of the group policies not being applied, my reason for …

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Aug
09

How To: Time Sync Across Windows Network

**Note from the Author:  Although this may be helpful for older OS versions, the process below is no longer the correct method. There are many reasons that a network administrator may want to synchronize the clocks on all Windows computers across the Active Directory domain.  The following steps will demonstrate how to easily accomplish that …

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Apr
12

Adding Sites to Internet Security Zones Using Group Policy

Sometimes it is useful to leverage the power of Group Policy in Active Directory to add sites to certain security zones in Internet Explorer.  This can save the network admin the trouble of managing the security zone lists for each computer (or user) separately.  In the following example, each user on the network needs to …

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Jan
20

Cannot Format Drive As exFAT

Symptom: When trying to format a newer, high capacity external hard drive or flash drive, the only option given is to format as exFAT.  When an attempt is made to format the volume as exFAT, the following message is returned:  “Windows was unable to complete the format.” Problem: Microsoft’s new filesystem, exFAT (a.k.a. FAT64), is …

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Jan
18

Outlook 2010 Will Not Open/Close When Using Folder Redirection/Offline Files

Symptoms: Outlook behaves erratically specifically when trying to open or close it. Double clicking it will launch an “OUTLOOK.EXE” process, but not load the GUI. The “OUTLOOK.EXE” process cannot be killed. The machine may hang on shutdown if you try to reboot while Outlook is still stuck. There may be sync conflicts in Sync Center …

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Aug
20

Outlook 2003 Send/Receive Error 0×8004010f “The operation failed. An object could not be found.”

Symptoms: On a computer running Outlook 2000/XP/2003 and connected to an Exchange server, the user gets error 0×8004010f  “The operation failed.  An object could not be found.” when performing a send/receive. Problem: Outlook cannot download the Offline Address Book from the Exchange server due to corruption or a database error. Solution: Rebuild the Offline Address …

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Aug
20

Windows Small Business Server POP3 Connector Stops Working

Symptoms: A user suddenly stops receiving mail and the POP3 Connector drops an eventID: 203 with an error code of 0x800ccc67. Problem: The POP3 connector will not download messages that have a malformed header & it leaves them on the POP server. Once 5 emails with bad headers accumulate on the server, it stops trying …

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