FAQS! FACTS! FAX!  210 (04/05/00)

GO AWAY COMEBACK

With reference to Jean Gamble's query about the persistent Dial Up Connection dialogue box in Outlook Express (‘Go Away’, F!F!F! 20th April), your advice is fundamentally correct but does not entirely solve the problem. Some e-mails and newsletters contain embedded hyperlinks to graphics, logos etc. This causes Outlook Express to try and establish a connection for each occurrence, resulting in several clicks on cancel before you can read the message uninterrupted, even if 'do not connect' is selected as you suggest.

The only way I know of to stop this is as follows: Open Internet Explorer, pull down the 'Tools' menu, click 'Internet Options', click 'Connections' and check the 'Never dial a connection' box. This solves the problem of Outlook Express trying to constantly dial, however the downside is that you will not be offered the option to go online when opening Outlook or a browser program. You will need to start your Internet connection from the icon in the dial-up networking folder before starting either program.

Ian Barker
 

I work as a mobile PC repair engineer and Jean Gamble’s problem sounds exactly the same as one I had on a computer I repaired last week. After much investigation I found the problem to be a virus infection. Norton Anti-virus 2000 was installed and run and it identified the virus a PrettyPark.Worm. Information on the virus said "This worm comes as PrettyPark.exe in e-mail’s. It quarantined the one infected file, as it was unable to repair it. In the end I deleted this file. After that the problem went away.

Steve Newton

Many thanks for those suggestions, and on the subject of viruses we had a worryingly large response to our item on the Kak ‘worm’.

KAK EPIDEMIC

Thanks for the information about the Kak virus and the patch information. Unfortunately, despite following the suggestions of the Datafellows site, I am still getting the "driver memory error" message when I switch on my computer. Can you say where I am going wrong? There is a suggestion about removing a line in the registry. Is this correct?

J. Kelso

I have visited the Microsoft website as per your advice but was unable to identify the patch to which you refer amongst the vast number of updates available.  Can you possibly be more explicit as to its name.

Tim Willis

Following your item on 20th April advising the patch obtainable from Microsoft, I have downloaded and installed what was there. However, it was described as a patch to overcome "scriptlet.typelib/Eyedog vulnerability" and originated in August 1999. There was no mention of "Kak" virus and searches for that yielded no results. Could you kindly confirm that I have downloaded the right patch?

Peter Clarke

Judging by the extraordinary number of emails we had on this topic (including quite a few infected with the Kak virus...) this little bug is spreading like wildfire and a creating a considerable number of problems. The Datafellows site we mentioned has all of the information most users need to eradicate the virus but it may be a little bit too teccy for novices or those of a nervous disposition, if so try the McAfee and Symantec (Norton) web sites at: http://vil.mcafee.com/

dispVirus.asp?virus_k=10509, and http://www.symantec.com

/avcenter/venc/data/wscript.kakworm.html

To summarise, the Kak virus, which apparently originated in France, is carried on emails and affects MS Outlook and Outlook Express versions 4 and 5. There have also been reports of a version that affects Netscape Messenger. You only have to read the message for the infection to occur. You may see a dialogue box asking if you want to run ‘Active X’ scripts but usually the first symptom is an error message usually something like ‘S3 Memory allocation failed’. You will probably find you can’t print email messages and the PC may suddenly switch itself off for no apparent reason.

Don’t panic, it won’t affect the rest of your system and removal is fairly straightforward. Kak, creates several files in the root directory of the C: drive and other locations, and creates a new Registry entry. These must all be removed, and to prevent the virus spreading to others, the option to add a Signature to outgoing emails must be disabled in Outlook Express. When that’s done install the patch from the Microsoft web site at:

http://www.microsoft.com

/technet/security/bulletin/ms99-032.asp

and click the link

ftp://ftp.microsoft.com

/peropsys/IE/IE-Public/Fixes/usa/Eyedog-fix/x86/q240308.exe

That will take you direct to the patch download; follow the instructions to install it automatically. Don’t worry about the name ‘Eyedog’, Kak is one of a family viruses (that started life as ‘Bubbleboy’) that exploit the same loophole in MS Outlook. If you receive an infected email after you’ve disinfected your PC you will get an Active X warning message, it can’t do any damage, however you should contact the sender to let them know that they are infected. Finally, if you are using a virus scanner make sure it is up to date.

PLAY FAIR

Before I had a new hard disk installed in my computer recently I took the precaution to back-up my important data, especially my play list for the Windows CD Player.  I looked in Windows Explorer/Windows, and found a file called ‘cdplyr’, which I copied. After my computer was working with the new hard drive, I located ‘cdplyr’ in Windows, and dragged my copy on to it, where it now nestles peacefully. When I now put a CD on to play, there is no sign of my play list appearing. I am not looking forward to the prospect of typing out the whole list again. Can you please help?
Joe Brown

You are on the right track, as it were, but on all of the systems we’ve looked at CD playlists are stored in a file called ‘cdplayer.ini’, which can normally be copied from one drive or PC to another without any problems. You can easily make sure it’s the right one, the file can be opened and read using Windows Notepad, which shows the track and title data as plain text.

LATENT LOGO

After upgrading to Windows 98 my PC still shows the Windows 95 logo on start up.  How can one change that?  I am loath to reload the Windows installation CD unless absolutely necessary.

Fred Cullingford

You can disable the start-up logo by adding or changing a command in the msdos.sys file, or you can delete or change the opening graphic, which is called logo.sys; both files are stored in the root directory of your C: drive. First open Windows Explorer, highlight drive C: go to the View menu then Folder Options, choose the View tab and in the Advanced Settings Window check the item Show All files. To disable the opening screen right-click on msdos.sys, choose properties and deselect Read Only under Attributes, now open Notepad (Start > Programs > Accessories) and open msdos.sys, under Options change the line Logo=1 to Logo=0, or enter the line if it’s not there. Select Save on the File menu and don’t forget to change the Attribute back to Read Only when you have finished.

Using Windows Explorer you should be able to force Windows to display the default Win 98 opening screen by renaming the logo.sys file to logo.old, otherwise you can change the image in Windows Paint, or create your own design using any image file, just call it logo.sys and store it in the root of drive C: but it must be saved as a 256 colour bitmap with dimensions of 320 x 400 pixels, all of which can be accomplished in Windows Paint.

CAPITAL IDEA

Occasionally when using Word I activate the Caps Lock button to type a heading and forget to unset it before moving on to the rest of the text. Is there a quick way of converting capitals to lower case letters without deleting the whole passage and retyping it?
Chris Weeks

Highlight the text, hold down the Shift key and press F3. The first press changes all copy from upper to lowercase, and vice versa, pressing it a second time inserts leading caps at the start of sentences etc.