Have you tried turning it off and on again?

"Turn it off and on again" is almost as canonic recipe as "Ctrl-Alt-Del". Here is an excellent video about first from "The IT Crowd" series:

External web camera can break your VMWare

Be careful with web cameras and VMWare. This string I needed to buy and install web camera since my laptop doesn't have one. And this simple step led to problems with using VMWare Workstation.

Luckily there a simple fix for the issue found at VMWare Communities:

1) Dont play or install any VMware Software.

1) After installation search for FixCamera.exe and delete it. (generally installed in folder Windows).

2) Run msconfig (I have Windows XP SP2) and in the Start tab, uncheck FixCamera.

My Web Cam's software still works fine without FixCamera.exe

Blogger and Picasa are connected

Just discovered connection between Blogger and Picasa. I don't use Picasa to hold my photos. So when I navigated to Picasa on web from my Gmail account I was surprised to find out that I have four images in there.
After eximining what are these images I recognized images from my posts in Blogger. I didn't know about this kind of integration between Blogger and Picasa. Pretty interesting fact.

"services.exe" virus

Today when going to the web site of Nissan dealer present in my city I've got a virus. What it does is sending e-mails from my machine. Pretty unexpected situation.
Unfortunaly my antivirus did not stop it, but I found solution in a couple of minutes:

• With the help of Task Manager I found additional services.exe running on the machine. The file was located at "C:\Windows\services.exe".
• Since Windows thinks that this virus is a system component it does not allow to stop it. I used CopyLock application to remove it at the next system start.
• Finally I removed this services.exe from the system startup list.

My system is healthy again!

Mistical trojan mmmsfusf.dll

Two days ago for some reason my computer stopped working as expected. Every time I was open results of Google search a page to arclane.com opened. I scaned computer with antivirus and took a look in internet. But it didn't help much. Unfortunally I didn't have much time and decided to come back to the problem at the end of this week.

And guess what happened today? A compete nightmare every time I used my internet browser (which is IE 5) it took forever to open a page. Just like in old times of dial-up.
I couldn't live with such a problem even a day. After some inverstigation I found a dll called mmmgfwgf.dll in my system32 directory. Creation date + strange name + search in google.com = looks like it is my problem. And again I found just a little information. Actually I found just one link: http://www.threatexpert.com/report.aspx?md5=4d013b3b1e327cc9582acc74f65ac150. It explains what this, but there were nothing about repairing the system.

My first try to remove this trojan finished with the crash of system. Fortunally I created an image before starting experimenting.
Second try was much better:

• First of all I used CopyLock to remove mmmsfusf.dll from system32.
• Then I changed value of "AppInit_DLLs" registery value that is located in "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows". I simply removed path to mmmsfusf.dll from it.
• And finally I removed "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\WinPathCRC" key.

And I can work again!