Bruce Williams's dashboard

Bruce Williams replied on August 25, 2008 17:34 to the question "Word docx for WU?" in Microsoft Corporation:

I agree that is dumb, but as a workaround Microsoft provides a free Word reader program: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/de...

Bruce Williams replied on August 25, 2008 17:31 to the question "MVP post may have what you're looking for" in Microsoft Corporation:

0x80080005 is a COM error - CO_E_SERVER_EXEC_ERROR. So its having some trouble running a COM server. There should be more information in your event log describing in more detail which server is having the problem.

Bruce Williams replied on August 07, 2008 17:47 to the problem "Vista start menu has stopped loading programs!" in Microsoft Corporation:

Is there any kind of error? Do you see any error messages in the event log?

Bruce Williams replied on August 07, 2008 17:46 to the question "How to prevent single website from opening in Internet Explorer?" in Microsoft Corporation:

Tools->Internet Options->Security Tab->Add the site to the "Restricted sites" zone. It won't stop you from opening the page, but it will certainly prevent the page from doing anything malicious to you. If you really need to not even see the page, you could probably hack up your 'hosts' file so the site's name points somewhere else.

Bruce Williams replied on August 07, 2008 17:37 to the problem "Why Dose Microsoft Update Keep Adding Vista Stuff To My Windows xp?" in Microsoft Corporation:

Ping me on e-mail (Bruce.Williams@microsoft.com) and I'll send you a code for a free support session. (Typically they are free if they turn out to be caused by a bug, but this code will make it a free call regardless.)

Bruce Williams replied on August 02, 2008 01:25 to the problem "Why Dose Microsoft Update Keep Adding Vista Stuff To My Windows xp?" in Microsoft Corporation:

If you need a guaranteed response, please contact Microsoft Support: http://support.microsoft.com. As far as I know just a couple of Microsoft folks follow this web site on an ad-hoc, if-our-day-job-gives-us-a-few-minutes, basis. I personally don't have any insight into this problem, or I'd help you.

Bruce Williams replied on July 27, 2008 06:02 to the problem "Why Dose Microsoft Update Keep Adding Vista Stuff To My Windows xp?" in Microsoft Corporation:

Weird. There must be some way to enable detailed installation logging - with that we could probably track down exactly why the wrong stuff is getting installed.

Bruce Williams replied on July 25, 2008 06:43 to the problem "Un-modified Xbox 360 banned from xbox live" in Microsoft Corporation:

where did you get it?

Bruce Williams replied on July 22, 2008 23:50 to the question "IE7" in Microsoft Corporation:

disable plugins and toolbars.
do a virus scan.
let us know if that helps.

Bruce Williams replied on July 18, 2008 17:48 to the question "tab bar for Word 2007" in Microsoft Corporation:

I know the Office folks do a lot of usability research, but I'm not on that team so I don't know if this in particular is something they considered, or why they might not have chosen the technique.

Bruce Williams replied on July 18, 2008 17:46 to the question ""ribbon" toolbar not in Visio" in Microsoft Corporation:

Just didn't have time to fit it in the ship schedule.

Bruce Williams replied on July 15, 2008 18:09 to the discussion "IE tab opening" in Microsoft Corporation:

That's not enough info to know for sure, but here are some things you can try:

disable addins
disable toolbars
disable the phishing filter

If any of those fix the problem, then you can strategically start re-enabling bits to figure out the exact piece that is causing your slowdown.

Bruce Williams replied on July 11, 2008 22:49 to the problem "Failing Vista SP1 Install receives 800F801F on 64 bit pc?" in Microsoft Corporation:

Could you double-check that error code? I don't see anything with that error code internally at Microsoft or on the internet. (Perhaps you meant 800F081F ?)

Bruce Williams replied on July 11, 2008 21:36 to the question "What are the valid / allowed characters for new Windows Live ID's and how are they normalized?" in Microsoft Corporation:

glad to help, although I have to admit that I was just a conduit between you and someone else on an internal microsoft mailing list.

Bruce Williams replied on July 11, 2008 19:26 to the question "What are the valid / allowed characters for new Windows Live ID's and how are they normalized?" in Microsoft Corporation:

Email name restriction:
EASI
Conforms to the SMTP RFC 822 <http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0822.txt> for username
portion of the email address and RFC 1035 <http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1035.txt> for
domain portion. Some exceptions are made:

Username:
64 chars max
1 char min
No UNICODE
Cannot have two adjacent periods “.”
Cannot start or end with a period.
Forbidden ASCII characters: 0-38, 40-44, 47, 58-64, 91-94, 96, 123-127

Domain:
48 chars max
1 char min (for the domain name, 3 characters if one considers the root as well
“x.y”)
No UNICODE
Cannot have two adjacent periods
Cannot start or end with a hyphen or a period.
Forbidden ASCII characters: 0-44, 47, 58-64, 91-97, 123-127

Hotmail/MSN
Conforms to the SMTP RFC 822 <http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0822.txt> for username
portion of the email address and RFC 1035 <http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1035.txt> for
domain portion. Some exceptions are made:

Username:
64 chars max
No UNICODE
First char must be a letter (must be in ASCII code range of 97-122, 65-90)
Period ‘.’ (ASCII 46) and Hyphen ‘-’ (ASCII 47) allowed except for the first
and last characters but cannot have two adjacent periods
All other chars must be in ASCII code range of 48-57 (numbers), 65-90
(uppercase), 95 (underscore), 97-122 (lowercase)
Cannot be in the MSN Disapproved Terms List

Bruce Williams replied on June 16, 2008 16:32 to the question "Outlook 2007 | New emails not showing in Inbox" in Microsoft Corporation:

Is your network connection OK? What things have you already tried to diagnose or fix the problem?

Bruce Williams marked one of Todd Jones' replies in Microsoft Corporation as useful. Todd Jones replied to the problem "Updates seemingly caused user setting files to corrupt".

Bruce Williams replied on June 13, 2008 20:31 to the problem "Updates seemingly caused user setting files to corrupt" in Microsoft Corporation:

Interesting, I'm glad they were able track it down. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help!

Bruce Williams replied on June 13, 2008 16:14 to the problem "Updates seemingly caused user setting files to corrupt" in Microsoft Corporation:

just the entries from around the time of the logon error - hopefully not too many.

Bruce Williams replied on June 13, 2008 15:06 to the problem "Updates seemingly caused user setting files to corrupt" in Microsoft Corporation:

that's ok, the error info should also be in the event log. could they check the system/security/app event logs and report any information found there? that should give me enough to search the bug db.