SOLUTION: When login password doesn't seem to work

PROBLEM: You can not log back in to your locked computer. This may happen when you a) block your computer in the middle of work using WinKey, the key to the right of CTRL key, and the L key; and b) you have more than one keyboard layout selected. In my particular case I have English (EN), as shown here, French (FR) and Spanish (SP) and depending on the language you are using, apparently Vista automatically switches to that layout. The trick is to make sure, before you type in your password, that you have selected English (EN) or the default language you chose when you installed Vista. Each language has its own keyboard layout and not all keys have the same value. If you know this you will save yourself a big headache.

SOLUTION: Starting Photoshop without problems

PROBLEM: Photoshop CS3 midway loading will give you “could not initialize Photoshop because the file is locked. Use the properties command in the windows explorer to unlock the file," and then it does not start (!)
SOLUTION: You might as well forget about trying to follow the above instructions. Browsing the web I found the quickest solution: press CRTL+ALT+SHIFT while double-clicking (or clicking on the quick launch) Photoshop icon. Bingo! This shortcut will fix the problem. It will basically replace (only if you decide to do so) the .PSP preferences file named Adobe Photoshop CS3 Prefs.psp located in the folder C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS3\Adobe Photoshop CS3 Settings. Search in C:\ or in the drive or partition where you have Vista installed.

SOLUTION: Uninstalling Explorer 8 Beta 1

In order to uninstall this beta version you need to go to Control Panel / Programs and Features / View installed updates, instead of the probably most obvious "Uninstall a program." A little bit more detailed instructions in one of the TechNet blogs.

SOLUTION: when updating to Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is half-done

When upgrading to the newly released Visual Studio SP1 you have to make sure the software gets actually installed. In other words, the lower progress bar (as shown) should go all the way to 100%. I say this because at some point during the upgrading process you get a message (I got it actually twice) asking you to reboot your system and then whether you ignore or continue the result is the same: the upgrade is NOT installed. When you try to run the program again, it runs as if nothing has happened and at some point you find out that (this was my case) you have to stop the "Machine Debug Manager (MDM)" service, AND the Windows Sidebar (apparently an important cog in the Vista wheel). After doing that I was able to to finally see the dialog box with the message "the software udpated has been installed successfully." Don't forget to take a look at, and save in another location, the installation log, an HTML file with very useful information called
%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%\AppData\Local\Temp\Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1_20080812_135937998.html (HOMEDRIVE is usually C:\ and HOMEPATH is the name of the currently logged user. To find out run Explorer using WinKey + E, and look up the first item on top, beneath Desktop).

SOLUTION: Installing Windows PowerShell, a sophisticated tool

Since Windows Vista (XP and Server, as well) doesn’t store its management data in text-style representations, but rather in "datacentric stores" with thousands of classes /objects, and a graphical tool may be too cumbersome when dealing with hundreds and thousands of machines at the time, a cool tool using the command line, released in 2006, is good to have for Vista and Windows Server. That tool is the Windows PowerShell. Instead of just passing text (like the old DOS shell), PowerShell passes objects! .NET objects, to be exact. However, installing it in Vista was somehow confusing. Either I had PowerShell already installed in my system and that's why I got the puzzling message shown here, or this is the message that one anyhow gets after installing PowerShell. To start go to the Windows PowerShell 1.0 Installation Package for Windows Vista page. After going through the instructions you will end up downloading a file called Windows6.0-KB928439-x86.msu, which happens to be a "Microsoft Update Standalone Package (also known as Windows Vista hot fix Updates)", go figure. In addition, "you cannot upgrade a Windows-based operating system when you have Windows PowerShell 1.0 installed", should you need to upgrade your system. But as that page warns if you disable Windows PowerShell by using the Turn Windows Features on or off option, this does not satisfy the Compatibility Check process. You must uninstall Windows PowerShell. The solution (?) proposed here is to ignore the message (as shown above) and then hit the Start button or press the WinKey and type PowerShell to get to a link that will take you to this new Windows tool. Another clue to know if PowerShell is installed: the presence of a directory called %HOMEDRIVE%\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0 where HOMEDRIVE is usually C:\, but it could be any other partition.

SOLUTION: When IIS7 does not work in VS 2008

I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to create an ASP.NET application running in the new IIS7 because I kept receiving the same error message: "Unable to create Web site ABC [because] FrontPage server extensions are not installed and 'IIS 6 Metabase and IIS 6 configuration compatibility' is not enabled." The annoying part was that the IIS6 Metabase was already activated and go figure what Frontpage server extensions were doing there! After fiddling with this install/uninstall, activate/deactivate conundrum, I decided to completely uninstall IIS7 and then reinstall it and Bingo! Now it works! This video in MSDN Channel was kind of helpful after having read and re-read the manual and various help forums, to no avail. I still don't know what Frontpage server extensions have to do in an IIS7 environment, though.

SOLUTION: when the back-slash sign appears as a Japanese yen sign

This happened after installing the Japanese Language Pack. In a system with English as the default language (the one you selected when you installed Vista) the yen sign (¥) sometimes shows instead of the back-slash (\) even after uninstalling this language pack. Solution: Go to Control Panel / Regional and Language Options / Select Administrative tab (as shown). Make sure the current language for non-Unicode programs is English. I had Japanese selected instead of English.