After I had installed a number of applications on my Vista system, I had to restart at some point and when the system came back up, a notification popped up telling me there had been some startup applications that had not been run because of missing permissions. Clicking the prompt brought up this window:

Now, for the life of me I can’t figure out what the applications are that are supposedly problematic. The only one that kind of sticks out at me is Skype, but that has been started and is running nicely. The window doesn’t seem to contain any information that’s relevant to my problem at hand, i.e. seeing those applications that have allegedly not been run. There doesn’t seem to be a way either to change any of the settings for the listed applications – seeing that Skype is “Not yet classified”, I would assume I can now classify it. Apparently I can’t. So is somebody else doing the classifying? Huh? Must be me…

I tried mapping a network drive to a share on my server, using the UNC path \\filer.win.sturmnet.org\sturm. Then I hit the “different user name” link – all this looks exactly like it used to under Windows XP. But it works differently: as soon as I log off and on again, the details about the user name and password to use are lost.

The solution was simple: the User Accounts applet in the Control Panel still allows to configure network passwords for an account, but the information I had entered while mapping the network drive wasn’t listed there. I entered it manually and everything works just fine now.

I’m having this really peculiar problem using the manual archiving functionality in Outlook (2007) and I’m really wondering if there’s something ridiculous I’m doing wrong, because I can’t imagine Outlook having such a horrendous bug. So if there’s anybody out there who can shed some light on the problem, I’d be grateful.

What I really want to do is simple: I have this enormous amount of mail in my Exchange account, collected over the 13–odd years I’ve been doing e-mail. I do throw mail away, but nothing that has ever been addressed to me directly, and so the volume has been ever increasing. Of course I have some folders in my hierarchy that I use for archiving purposes, and I regularly (once a year) used to move my old mail into these archive folders manually. I never wanted to trust any automatic functionality to do it for me.

Now I looked into automatic archiving functionality in Outlook and Exchange. First I was surprised that Exchange basically doesn’t have such functionality – it seems pretty stupid to me that as soon as mail is being archived on my machine, it leaves the secure environment of my server. Anyway, I made plans to have Outlook archive my mail once a year into separate mailbox files that I could then copy to the server for backup purposes (and keep a copy on the workstation as well, for indexing and searching).

Before I can start to rely on an automated process to do this for me, I have the current situation to take care of: lots of years of mail combined in one mailbox need to be split into multiple files. I was glad to find that Outlook seems to have a special dialog to do this precise thing – I had already seen myself change the archival settings for all my folders to each of the required timeframes in one enormous mouse click orgy. The dialog I found is under FILE | ARCHIVE and it appears to allow manual archiving, even of single folders, even with conflicting archival settings on the folder itself, for content of arbitrary age. Great!

Now, here comes the problem: this functionality doesn’t seem to work. Not at all.

I created a test folder in my hierarchy and copied some mails into it. Some of these mails are new (2006), others are older (2003). I brought up the archive dialog, selected the “Archive this folder and all subfolders” radio button and selected the test folder from the tree view. I set “1/1/2006” as the date in the “Archive items older than” edit field and checked the “Include items with ‘Do not AutoArchive’ checked” option. I entered a name for a new archive file and hit OK. Outlook started working and the status bar told me that my test folder was being archived. A short while later the process ended.

The result was… well, absolutely nothing. Okay, nearly nothing – certainly nothing useful. The content of my test folder is unchanged. The new archive file has been created and opened in my Outlook folder list. In that new file, the hierarchy has been partly recreated, as far as needed for the test folder I was archiving. But the test folder in the archive file is completely empty.

So, that’s it. I’m writing this down to remind myself at a later point of what exactly I did and how it didn’t work. If there’s anybody out there with an idea what I’m doing wrong, please do let me know. Thank you!

I have just made a list of presentations I’m prepared to do right now. Available here, have a look. I’m also going to suggest a number of these for DDD day 4 – session proposals are open, so go there yourself if you’d like to have a go this time around!

I was just going to start submitting sessions for DDD 4 and I found a new restriction in place: DDD 4 speaker submission is only open to UK residents. As you may or may not know, I do live in the UK, so this doesn’t shut me out or anything – I just happen to find it a pretty rude decision, considering that speakers from other countries have been allowed to take part in previous DDD events, and they did so on their own expense.

What do you think? I can come up with a few ideas about the reasoning for this decision, but none of them seems really convincing. Do we need such a restriction for DDD day?