Month: July 2016

DWG icon in Windows Explorer missing

Jeff Miles Leave a comment

I finally resolved a long-standing issue for one user that was minor but quite annoying.

At some point the icon within Windows Explorer for DWG files stopped appearing; instead it gave the odd image when an icon is assigned but not found.

There had been many attempts to reset this using the “Open With” dialog, and the File Associations within Windows, to no avail.

Next I turned to the FileTypesMan program to see if I could reset the association. I could see that the .dwg file type was associated with AutoCAD.Drawing.20 and had an appropriate icon assigned, however the UserChoice setting was stuck on AutoCAD.Drawing.19 and whenever I tried to change this, it would provide an “Access is denied” error.

Eventually I discovered the UserChoice setting is stored in the registry here:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExt\.dwg\UserChoice

The permissions on that key had a special entry to Deny access for my user account; when removed I was able to use the FileTypesMan to re-associate the UserChoice with AutoCAD.Drawing.20 and the icon re-appeared.

Deploy VPN connection remotely

Jeff Miles Leave a comment

Here’s what I’ve developed to push a VPN client connection within Windows networking to remote PCs. One flaw is that this is user-based; I’m not sure if it could be applied to all users.

  1. Create a VPN connection with your desired settings on a template workstation
  2. Navigate to %appdata%\Microsoft\Network\Connections\Pbk
  3. Copy “rasphone.pbk” to a central source
  4. Either distribute that .pbk file directly to users to double-click on, or drop it into the same folder on their profile as it was originally retrieved from.

This .pbk file doesn’t store user credentials, so you will need to inform your user of those in advance.

Skype for Business contact wrong name

Jeff Miles Leave a comment

I recently solved an odd issue with Skype for Business and an apparent duplicate contact name.

For a single user, when they searched and made a favorite of Employee A, the display name and contact card would appear as Employee B.

At first I thought this was related to Employee A being on temporary layoff and returning, in which time we had assigned that email address to Employee B. However this turned out to be a red herring.

Next I tried to clear the Skype contact cache, based on a Microsoft KB article: https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/kb/2435699

This didn’t solve the issue either.

I finally solved this by looking within the personal Contacts of this user’s Outlook mailbox. They had a contact for Employee A which contained a bunch of info for Employee B; I presume this was manually created during the layoff period.

Skype for Business was modifying it’s display of the contact based on the personal contact found in the mailbox, rather than strictly what was in the Global Address List.

I deleted that personal contact, restarted Skype, and Employee A once again appeared as himself.