Lately we’ve been encountering some rather frustrating issues at work. These issues have been piling up as we’ve been otherwise unable to find a solution to them. It was beginning to get maddening.
Let’s start from the top:
SPLWoW64 crash with error message: “The program cam’t start because x2utilHL.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.” This happened exclusively in 32-bit applications on a 64-bit operating system. This was a little difficult to figure out, but we think we finally got it. In our environment users get printers added through a login script that maps printers based on location and user. That is to say, if I login at building A on device 1a, I get printers X (and if I login on device 2b, I get printers Z) but if I login at building B on device 1b, I get printers C. At one building we have recently swapped to 64-bit Windows 7. The problem seemed to start when we got new Xerox multifunction printers. In looking at the queues on the print server, we see that the 32-bit print driver was not installed. So we installed it. The problems have slowly been trickling away. Of note: we had to completely remove the printers from machines, and then remove any printer ports, and then remove any installed printer drivers. The next time they logged in the problem went away. Fingers crossed.
Dell Latitude 2110 not getting WiFi access no matter what. It was weird. It had been working for 3 years with no problem, but all of a sudden this morning it wouldn’t connect to any of our secure networks (using a certificate). We reset winsock, we uninstalled and reinstalled the hardware, we updated the drivers, we did gpupdates, everything we could think of. We even cleared out DHCP entries on the DCs and white-listed it in the Aruba Wireless Controller to make sure it wasn’t getting black-listed for failed authentication attempts (which we were seeing). In the error logs we were seeing details about DHCP failed (DHCPNACK). None of the related google searches seemed to help. It’s been very frustrating and slow-going. We restore an image to the netbook and it works 100% fine. So weird. There must have been some deep-seated change to the OS that we just weren’t aware of. Maybe corruption somewhere, since users can’t make system-wide changes. Very frustrating. It takes about 2 hours to image and deploy packages to a netbook. 2 hours for what should be a simple fix. Go figure. I’m sure there’s an easier method but I’m just missing it.
These were fun challenges to try and figure out. I love a good challenge. I even love a good challenge that I can actually complete and figure out. It’s very rewarding to me. Helping people as a general rule makes me feel all warm n’ fuzzy inside.
This week has been a good week. People have been thanking us for our hard work. That’s a rare treat, and I think I will savor it for the weekend.
It is nice to be appreciated for the effort we put in to our jobs.
I hope you all get the same courtesy at yours. Enjoy your weekend folks.
-M
