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Googler’s Haven technical tips

Problems

Answers

File History unable to start a backup cycle for configuration

File History in Windows 10 can spontaneously stop working, reporting event FileHistory-Core 200 into the File History backup log: “File History unable to start a backup cycle for configuration C:\Users\…\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\FileHistory\Configuration\Config”. (This log, Microsoft-Windows-FileHistory-Engine/BackupLog, is found at Applications and Services Logs → Microsoft → Windows → FileHistory-Engine.)

The first step to resolving this is to restart the File History Service (fhsvc), as sometimes it stops working.

Another cause of the problem is a sharing violation on C:\Users\…\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\FileHistory\Configuration\Catalog1.edb which can be observed in Process Monitor during an attempted backup. For some reason this file gets opened by other processes; at work, it’s File Explorer, and at home it’s Mozilla Firefox. Attempts to close the file handle in Process Explorer are completely ignored; the offending process must be closed to release the file handle. After this, File History backups will resume normally.

Event log scheduled task completely ignored

After creating a scheduled task that fires when an event log entry is created, you may find that it is completely ignored. The task may sit forever in a “not yet run” state (“last run” result of 0x41303).

The “On an event” trigger type has three key properties: Log, Source and Event ID. Source is a combo box, suggesting erroneously that you can type in or paste in the source name. This does not work. To make the event work, select the source from the combo box’s dropdown menu and save. Typed in or pasted in source names are saved but are not recognised, not in Windows 10 anyway.

Drag and drop stops working

Sometimes, drag and drop stops working — this problem was there in Windows XP and is still there in Windows 10. You try to drag an e-mail in Outlook or a file in File Explorer, and the drag attempt is completely ignored. Raymond Chen explained years ago why this happens, but no automatic solution was ever reached at Microsoft.

The workaround: begin dragging an item, and tap Esc while keeping the mouse button held. Then try again.

Taskbar thumbnails stop appearing

Sometimes, Windows will show a tooltip of the window name instead of a taskbar thumbnail. The solution, courtesy of RaMMicHaeL, is to hold the shift key and right-click a taskbar button. After that, thumbnails resume working. Again, still broken in Windows 10.

How do I type characters not on the keyboard, under Windows?

The Apple Macintosh has long supported easy entry of typographer’s and mathematical characters and foreign and accented letters on an English keyboard layout (I don’t know how this applies to layouts other than the United States and United Kingdom). For example, an en dash “–” is opt--, a-acute “á” is opt-e, a, while double quotation marks are opt-] and opt-}.

One option is to use an extended keyboard locale, such as United States International or United Kingdom International, or John Sullivan’s third-party United Kingdom International (long since abandoned). Ultimately, it seems that the only practical option is to make use of AutoHotkey. An example AutoHotkey script is below, providing five commonly-used characters:

^!-::–  ;       ctrl+alt+- = en dash
+^!-::— ; shift+ctrl+alt+- = em dash
+^!8::° ; shift+ctrl+alt+8 = degrees
^!8::•  ;       ctrl+alt+8 = bullet
^!l::…  ;       ctrl+alt+l = ellipsis

This process even permits input of Unicode characters directly into compatible software, such as the following:

^!m::SendInput {U+2212} ;        ctrl+alt+M = minus sign

The definition order does matter when it comes to different combinations of modifier keys. For example, to bind two different modifier combinations to the 2 key, they must be defined most-specific first: 

+^!?2::SendInput {U+2033} ; ctrl+alt+shift+2 = double prime

^!1::¹
^!2::²
^!3::³
…

It is perfectly possible to provide dead key support in AutoHotkey using state variables, allowing for complete replacement of international keyboard layouts with a single AutoHotkey script.

The example file ExtendedCharacterEntry.ahk contains the above along with dead-key input for several diacritics. It is not complete; it was created to replace the United Kingdom International layout which was not only incomplete (and the author refused to respond to any enquiries) but would break with every new Windows 10 version. You can place this into %APPDATA%\AutoHotkey\Lib and include this inside your main AutoHotkey file as follows:

#Include <ExtendedCharacterEntry>

How do I prevent Shift+Control+Alt+Windows launching Office?

Microsoft introduced an incredibly stupid hack into Windows: pressing Shift+Control+Alt+Windows together (without any other letter, number or symbol key) opens the Microsoft Office website. These are the keys I pound when inevitably something has caused one of the modifier keys to get “stuck” inside Windows, and that opens lots of Office pages. As this shortcut is baked into Explorer somewhere and not “owned” by anything, you can’t disable it. The best solution for me is this one from the relevant SuperUser page:

reg add HKCU\Software\Classes\ms-officeapp\Shell\Open\Command /t REG_SZ /d rundll32

All this does is map the shortcut to a program that opens no window and immediately terminates. The shortcut still does something, while at the same time doing nothing. Run this command from an elevated Command Prompt window. No doubt there is an equivalent and excessively gory PowerShell equivalent.

How do I make Thunderbird close the message compose window before sending?

Mozilla Thunderbird has an annoying problem where the message compose window gets in the way after you request it to send a message. Most mail clients will send from the Outbox and close the compose window as soon as you request the message to be sent.

Thunderbird does support this behaviour, but it is still an advanced setting, and the feature seems to be still in development. To enable this behaviour, simply set offline.send.unsent_messages to true. Thunderbird will need restarting. The setting mailnews.show_send_progress may also need to be set to true.