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From a techies blog....

Here’s a blow-by-blow account of the problem I encountered last week, all details of which have been confirmed by Microsoft:

A visit to Dell’s support website turned up a pair of recommended updates for the onboard Intel SATA controllers on my XPS 410 and XPS 210 systems. Running the first executable package copied the driver files to Vista’s driver store; the second installed the Intel Matrix Storage Console, which in turn updates the drivers and then provides information about installed SATA devices, allows you to set up RAID features, and helps manage RAID drives.

After completing the update on the first system, I was surprised when a pop-up message informed me that the system needed to be activated within three days. I followed the link to the online activation screen, which informed me that I had to phone in for activation. That process, while tedious, didn’t take long. I dialed a toll-free number, used the telephone keypad to punch in the digits showing on my screen, and then punched in a matching set of numbers a live operator read back to me. It all took just over five minutes.

When I updated the driver on the second system, I had to go through exactly the same song and dance. And just to confirm that the driver was the cause of the problem, I used System Restore to uninstall the new Intel driver and roll back to the default, Microsoft-supplied driver. Bingo. Reactivation required.

With the help of those Microsoft engineers, I learned that I’m not the only one experiencing this problem. Last month, when I first asked Microsoft for a comment on the story, David Lazar, who heads the Windows Genuine Advantage group, wrote back with this explanation, citing “a few open bugs that we have identified and are presently working to fix”:

[S]ome hardware drivers can cause some systems to require activation multiple times. … The temporary fix is to telephone activate. We’re working with vendors of the affected drivers to get updates out as quickly as possible. (As you know, manufacturers are continuously updating and releasing new device drivers.)

Again, we are actively working on the solutions and expect resolution shortly. Quality and customer service are our top priorities, and we continue to reduce our response time, and improve as we learn more since the release of Windows Vista.

Since that time, I’ve picked up a few more technical details. The problem occurs with the Intel driver because it reports the hard drive serial number in a different format than the Microsoft driver uses; as a result, the system thinks the hard drive has been changed. Couple that with a memory upgrade I did and it was enough to flag my system as “out of tolerance.”

The Intel driver isn’t the only one that has this problem, either. Apparently one or more storage drivers from Nvidia and Silicon Image are prone to the same glitch. In all cases, the only workaround is to reactivate after installing the new driver. That will be cold comfort for a small business that has to pay for several hours of time with their tech support consultant to manually activate an office full of Vista machines.

I know that Microsoft is working aggressively to resolve this system, both by convincing vendors to update drivers so they don’t break activation and by developing an update they can push down via Windows Update. Either of those solutions will take weeks or months, and in the meantime some early Vista adopters are going to be inconvenienced.

One more mitigating factor: This issue apparently only affects those who install Windows Vista using retail media. For the 90% or more of the Vista customer base who are getting OEM machines with Windows Vista preinstalled, this won’t be an issue, as OEM activations are tied to the system BIOS and activation status is only affected if you swap out a motherboard. This should also be a non-issue for corporate customers using volume licensing programs...

Have you experienced any of these problems with Windows Vista? After opening a large number of programs and windows, you try to launch a new program or open a new browser tab or even switch back to an already running program and instead:

You get a strange “out of memory” message, despite the fact that you’re using only a fraction of the RAM installed on your system.

The window opens but its contents refuse to load.

The window opens, but menus are missing, dialog boxes are empty, or buttons don’t work.

In my case, I experienced this problem regularly on multiple Vista systems when I opened Outlook 2007, Forte Agent, Adobe Acrobat (editing three or four large documents), BlogJet, Windows Live Writer, Word (working with several large documents), and IE7 with more than 30 tabs.

The problem vanished for me, as it does for most people, when I closed a few windows, but that’s obviously not the ideal solution. After all, what’s the point of having all that RAM if you can’t use it?

The problem, as it turns out, is as old as the Windows NT family. I’ve found references to this issue that date back to the mid-1990s and Windows NT 3.1 and 3.5. The fix for Vista, just as for those much older versions of Windows, involves editing a key in the Windows Registry.

First the problem: Windows sets aside a blob of system memory called the desktop heap, which it uses to store user interface objects such as windows, menus, and hooks.

(The Microsoft Advanced Windows Debugging and Troubleshooting Blog offers a dense, but still readable explication of the problem and why it occurs (it’s a two-part series: read the Desktop Heap Overview first and if your eyes haven’t glazed over read the shorter Desktop Heap Part 2 for details that are specific to 64–bit Windows, systems with 3GB of RAM, and Windows Vista).

The fix for 32–bit Windows Vista is simple: The interactive desktop heap size needs to be bumped up to a value greater than its default setting of 3072KB. I recommend a conservative approach: increase the value to 4096 and try that for a while.

If you continue to bump into the problem, try a higher value. On one system here, I’ve been running without issues using a value of 8192KB.

Before I explain how to make the change, I offer the following disclaimers:

Editing the Registry is not a trivial task.

If you make a mistake, or if your system doesn’t work the way mine does, you could end up causing damage to data or render your system unbootable. You do this at your own risk.

OK, with that out of the way, here are the step-by-step instructions:

(1) Click Start, type regedit in the Search box, and click the Regedit icon that appears at the top of the Start menu.

(2) Click OK in response to the UAC prompt.

(3) In Registry Editor, navigate to the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
– SYSTEM
– – CurrentControlSet
– – – Control
– – – – Session Manager
– – – – – SubSystems

(4) In the contents pane to the right, double-click the Windows value from the bottom of the list. This opens an Edit String dialog box containing a very long text string.

(5) Scroll through this text value until you find the section that begins with SharedSection. Change the second value from its default of 3072 to a higher number. Do not change any other values.

Refer to the attached picture ....

Restart the computer. If your experience is like mine, you’ll find that those odd error messages are gone and that you’re able to open many more windows without any display issues.

Apple has issued a monster update with patches for about 50 security vulnerabilities affecting iPhone, Safari and Mac OS X users.

In a race against the clock, the company rushed out iPhone v1.0 with fixes for four different vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to take full control of the device. The fix comes 24 hours ahead of the expected full disclosure of one of the iPhone vulnerabilities at the Black Hat security conference here.

Security researcher Charlie Miller, who found what is believed to be the first remotely exploitable iPhone bug, told me by e-mail earlier that he was giving his iPhone takeover demo whether or not Apple released a patch.

Apple’s advisory, Miller is credited with finding and reporting one of the issues — heap buffer overflows in the Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) library used by the JavaScript engine in Safari. The iPhone update, which is only available via iTunes, also fixes three other flaws in Safari, WebCore and WebKit.

Apple also released a separate advisory to highlight the browser fixes available for Safari. The bugs could cause code execution attacks on Mac OS X, Windows XP and Windows Vista systems.

A third advisory from Cupertino (Security Update 2007-007) patches a total of 45 vulnerabilities in a wide range of Mac OS X components.