BIT Consultants » Troubleshooting

Home Sharing Broken in iTunes 10.5.3 (fixed)

Rob — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 02:14:01 +0000

[WINDOWS ONLY] After I updated to iTunes 10.5.3, I noticed that home sharing did not work at all. I took all of the steps at Apple’s support article (http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2972) to no avail. Ultimately, I figured out that the problem is with 10.5.3 itself. Here is how to get Home Sharing working again:

Download iTunes 10.5.2 here:
32 bit: http://www.filehippo.com/download_itunes_32/11232/
64 bit: http://www.filehippo.com/download_itunes_64/11233/

Click on “Start” or the Windows Orb (depending on which version of Windows you are using) and click Run. If you don’t see “Run”, hold the Window key on your keyboard and press ‘r’. Enter the following text into the run dialog:
%APPDATA%\Apple Computer

Highlight all of the folders in the window that opens (Ctrl + a) and copy them (Ctrl + c), create a new folder on your desktop and call it ‘Apple Computer’. This is just a backup in case something goes wrong with the reinstall.

Once again, go to Start > Run (Window key + r) and type: appwiz.cpl

Look for iTunes in the list, and uninstall it. Once the uninstall is complete, double-click the iTunes installer you downloaded from File Hippo and follow the prompts. Once the installation completes, open iTunes and login to your Apple account when prompted, ensure that Home Sharing is turned on by clicking on Advanced in the menu (it should say “Turn off Home Sharing (YOUR ACCOUNT)” if Home Sharing is turned on).

That’s it.

Fixed: Windows 7 Explorer.exe Server Execution Failed

Rob — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 22:50:36 +0000

This error message can occur for the following reasons:

Your Documents Library is pointed to an external drive which is disconnected
The registry entries dictating where your Shell and User Shell folders has been changed

If your libraries are pointed to an external drive, plug it in or turn it on to resolve the issue. Otherwise…

The easy way:

Click on Libraries
Right-click on Documents and select “Properties” from the menu
Click on the Restore Defaults button at the bottom right side of the dialog
Click OK

The hard way

open the Registry Editor by clicking Start (Windows Orb) > Run (or by pressing the Window’s and R keys on your keyboard simultaneously).
Type “regedit” and press Enter or click OK. (confirm UAC if prompted)
Navigate to the following entry HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders\Personal
Once you have clicked on “Shell Folders” and see My Pictures, My Music, etc.; select File > Export from the menu and save a backup of this registry key to C:\shellfolders.reg
Change the key named Personal to something like C:\Users\Demo User\Documents (replacing Demo User with your account name) by double-clicking on it. If you are confused about what value should be put into Personal, look at the other entries for Pictures, Music, etc. and make it similar to those.
Click OK
Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\Personal
Backup the key as before by selecting File > Export
Double-click the Personal key and enter %USERPROFILE%\Documents
Click OK
Close the Registry Editor
Open Libraries and select Documents, all should be working again.

If for some reason this does not work for you, navigate to C:\shellfolders.reg (or wherever you saved the exported key) and double click on the file (authorize UAC) to restore it to it’s original state.

Warning: modifying your registry can damage your computer, make sure you have your files backed up and that you export anything you modify so that it may be restored. This is advice that may or may not fix your problem, we take no responsibility whatsoever for any damage done to your computer as a result of the instructions contained here

XAMPP ulimit error on Mac OSX

Rob — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 22:59:39 +0000

If you are running XAMPP on Mac and can’t start apache, you are likely getting an unhelpful error message. If the message is blank, it could be because one of your local websites doesn’t have a logs folder; it could also be a hostname issue. If you are getting an error regarding ulimit and have tried the other fix on the web (commenting out the three lines related to ulimit in /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/bin/apachectl) then your problem is likely related to hostname binding.

Check your error log at:

tail -f /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/logs/error_log

Start apache and see if you get an error regarding nodename or hostname

In terminal again, run the following command:

ping $(hostname)

If you get no response, then your hostname is not bound to your IP address, and apache doesn’t like that. Here is how you fix it:

echo "127.0.0.1 " $(hostname) | pbcopy

Open your /etc/hosts file and paste your clipboard contents in, restart apache and it should be working fine.

Explorer: Executable files won’t launch

Rob — Fri, 08 May 2009 18:52:19 +0000

Recently, I have dealt with a few computers where malware had wrecked Windows Explorer’s handling of executable files. Whenever you attempt to launch an executable file, you are told Windows doesn’t know what to do with the file, sometimes being prompted to download the file you were trying to launch. Right-click the file linked here and save it to your desktop. Once it’s downloaded, right-click it and select Install. This should fix Windows handling of executable files. If you can’t get anything to launch, try showing file extensions by opening a folder or My Computer and selecting Tools > Hide extensions for known file types (uncheck the box); find the file you want to launch (e.g. “firefox.exe”), change the file extension to com (“firefox.com”). It could be that only the exe file handling has been wrecked.

More information from Symantec (source of the fix) here: http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2004-050614-0532-99