After updating my recently installed Foxit Reader to most recent version lead to an unexpected behavior: whenever I start Foxit Reader I get the UAC-dialog in Vista. This is more than just annoying.

Well, looking at the settings dialog of Foxit didn’t reveal anything unusual. But then it strikes me: I looked at the settings using my regular user account! Switching to the all-user settings of the link revealed, that administrative privileges where being required in order to start Foxit! Bummer!!

I thought, that I had my HTC Touch Pro, Vista x64 SP2 and Outlook 2007 all set up – and then come some stupid update and everythings seems to be back to start.

After switching on bluetooth on my laptop I get a nice looking Vista dialog stating “Installing Bluetooth Peripheral Device” – NOT! I mean, Vista couldn’t find an apropriate driver 🙁

OK, so there is help; you just have to do it yourself.

• ignore the failing “Installing Bluetooth Peripheral Device” dialog
• open the device manager and open the properties for the not corret installed bluetooth device
• select “reinstall driver” and select to manually supply the driver
• browse to “Microsoft Corporation” as the manufacturer (beware: there is also just “Microsoft”, which doesn’t do!) and the select either Windows Mobile 6.0 or 6.1

that all – why can’t Vista do all this on his own?

More astonishing thinks reveal them self, the more I work with my new Vista x64. Apparently PDF preview (using Acrobat Reader) is broken since version 8.x (like 2 years ago!!) and Adobe didn’t bother to fix it since then. All this is nicely documented in an according forum-thread.

Getting a brand new system, installed with Vista SP2 and all the latest hotfixes you would assume this is just a top notch system – it’s not!

If you try to access files via WebDAV, for example content on your corporates internal sharepoint server, you’re presented a ton of credential dialogs to enter your username and password just by opening that stupid word or excel file. This is just sucks big time!

For some really strange reason IE thinks that the URL server.companydomain.com is an internet-address and not in intranet-address – event though the domain is set as the intranet-zone in the IE settings. Obviously the WebClient is not recognizing the IE settings in this respect (when it comes to proxy settings, it does honor the IE setting though!).

Well, there are a couple of KB articles describing this problem (like KB 941853 or KB 941890). But they don’t seem to offer any relief.

Finally I came across a blog-posting of the SharePoint Team, which offered some insight of the problem – and finally a solution that worked (at least on my system with installed SP2 – if you don’t have SP1 installed you might need to get a fix from Microsoft):

1. in the registry go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters and add a new multi-line entry called AuthForwardServerList.
2. add a white-list of servers/domains to this list to which you would like to automatically pass your credentials. This is the same namingstyle as the zone-settings of IE – so beware of wildcards!
3. finally restart the WebClient service in order for the new settings to take effect.

Well, from XP I’m used to just pop up the current computer properties and just set permanent environment variables. In Vista this is however different. This will require a priviledge elevation, and thus you’ll only be able to edit the admin’s variables, but not the environment of a regular user.

This being said – the answer is quite simple: setx. To set a variable like JAVAHOME just call setx JAVAHOME "c:\Program Files\java" and that’s all.