Fortunately, after a bit of research I found a solution that did actually work, and the PC hasn’t missed a beat since.

The error message can indicate a IRPStackSize bug, and looking at the event log of the machine for an error with ID 2011, is further eveidence of this particular bug.

What is the IRPStackSize? Well, straight from the Microsoft website:

The IRPStackSize parameter specifies the number of stack locations in I/O request packets (IRPs) that are used by Windows 2000 Server, by Windows Server 2003, and by Windows XP. You may have to increase this number for certain transports, for media access control (MAC) drivers, or for file system drivers. Each stack uses 36 bytes of memory for each receive buffer.

I don’t know about you , but I’m still none the wiser

Anyway, let’s get around fixing it…..

Before I go on, my disclaimer: Trying the below is done so at you own risk. I take no responsibility for any problems that may occur. The fix involves a registry change, so if you are not comfortable playing with the registry, get someone that is.

Open up the registry (regedit from the run box), and navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
\SYSTEM
\CurrentControlSet
\Services
\LanmanServer
\Parameters

Look for a parameter called IRPStackSize. Whatever the value is, we need to increase it. From what I’ve read on other sites, a value of between 15 and 25 will work. I tried 16 and it didn’t. 20 did.

if you don’t have a IRPStackSize entry, create one by right clicking in the right hand window, and select new>DWORD value. Call it IRPStackSize (note: case sensitive).

Once done, click on it and enter a value (as a decimel). As you can see, I entered 20 – shown here as 14 in hex:

Once done, close the window and restart the computer and then you should be able to access the share.

What causes the bug? Well I read that programs like Acronis True Image, Seagate Disc Wizard and Symtec Endpoint protection can be the culprits. In my case, I had a fresh install of XP Pro, with Acronis True Image. Fairly easy fix, and as I said earlier, all has been fine since.

I would be interested in other people’s experiences. Please share them below.

There are a quite a few software tools out there on the net that can do that for you, but you don’t need them. I’ll show you a couple of ways (and I’m sure there is more).

* Open up a command prompt (Start>Run type in cmd and press enter)
* Type the following command: Systeminfo | Find “Up Time” (! Case sensitive)

This will take a few seconds and you will see messages that Windows is loading certain information. Eventually you’ll get an output similar to this:

System Up Time: 1 Days, 0 Hours, 57 Minutes, 18 Seconds

The other way is even simpler.

* Again, open up a command prompt
* Type in net statistics workstation
* you get a few lines of info but the one you are looking for will look something like this:

Statistics since 2/3/2009 7:23 AM

How do you stop it? When I first came across the problem I found some registry hacks and other methods. But then I found a mcuh easier way to do it.

* Go to ‘My Computer’
* From there, click on Tools>Folder Options
* On the ‘view’ tab, untick the first option which is ‘automatically search for network folders and printers’ (see pic below):

Done!!!

But what if you want to find out information about devices that aren’t connected eg USB based devices?

Try this:

1. Go to Start, right-click My Computer, and select Properties.
2. In the System Properties dialog box, select the Advanced tab and click the Environment Variables button.
3. In the Environment Variables dialog box, locate the System Variables panel and click New.
4. In the New System Variable dialog box, type DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES in the Variable Name text box and type 1 in the Variable Value text box.
5. Click OK twice.
6. To view the nonpresent devices, go to Start, right-click My Computer, and select Manage.
7. Click Device Manager, pull down the View menu, and select Show Hidden Devices.

It’s called Xobni, and works with Outlook 2003/2007 on XP and Vista Operating Systems.

One of the many features it has is when you open an email, the Xobni sidebar will show you all related emails from the sender, how many emails you send receive the them, and even a trend graph of what time you get emails from him/her.

That is one of many. Check out the Youtube video below for a tour of this plugin:

If you need to download it manually and/or hate windows update, here is a link to a page that lists the locations of the SP3 ISOs ready to download.

The most common/popular one will no doubt be the English ISO, so here’s the direct link from Microsoft for it.

But what if you don’t have a Windows key on your keyboard? There are a couple of other ways to do it:

My choice is to create a shortcut on your desktop as you will probably use it over and over. Right click on an empty area of your desktop and click on new>shortcut. Enter rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation and click on next, name your shortcut and click finish. That’s it.
If you want to change the icon, right click the shortcut and go to properties>shortcut>change icon. Browse to the moricons.dll in your system32 folder to see a large number of cions to choose from.

A quick and dirty way to achieve the same result is clock on start>run and enter rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation in the command dialog box.

If you have fast user switching enabled, another way is to bring up task manager, click on the shutdown menu, and select switch user. Same result.

Yes, the linux learning curve is steep but rewarding when you do start working it all out.

Here is a good website that lists the Windows/OS X software and the linux equivalents.

In a lot of cases there are multiple options which is good. You aren’t tied down to one thing which you may not like.

There is a solution – Auto XP reboot remover. Best thing is it’s freeware as well.

If you are reading this guide because you want to get rid of an item that is causing problems with your PC, I would strongly suggest scanning your PC for viruses and adware/malware first. Any such items found will be removed automatically.

To look at all the startup items, click on start>run and type in the window that comes up msconfig (as shown below):

You should see a window with a few tabs across the top. I won’t bother explaining them all as for 99% of the time, you will not need to change anything.

Click on the startup tab, and the following window should come up:

Looks a bit daunting, but all that is required is to identify each item, and if the name isn’t enough to give you a bit of a clue, go here and put the name of the item in to see what it relates to.

To disable any items, just deselect the check box to the left of the respective item. Note: this will not remove it, so if so desired, it can be included at a later date.

Once you are satisfied with your (de)selections, click OK and you will then be prompted to restart the computer. That’s all it takes!