There are plenty of little annoyances and/or problems with Windows XP itself, and there are already plenty of web sites devoted to making them easier to live with. Thus, the following are the more useful tidbits I've gleaned that I don't want to lose.
Control Panel User Accounts Applet is Blank
How to Enable ClearType
How to Enable DMA Access
How to Repair/Reinstall Internet Explorer 6
Performance Counters are Missing
User Interface Tweaking Utilities
Windows Update is Blank
This is another one of those irritating problems that occurs because the VBScript component has been removed or corrupted. To the best of my knowledge every other control panel applet works without VBScript even installed, but the user accounts applet will appear as a blank window if it's missing or damaged. Refer to the Windows Update Is Blank topic below for instructions on fixing it.
ClearType is a great little hack from the typography folks at Microsoft. Though it works best on LCD screens, it also makes a welcome change for the better on any other type of display as well. To enable it, go to the Microsoft ClearType information page and follow the instructions. To the best of my knowledge, one must be using Internet Explorer for that site to work, the reason being that it relies upon VBScript to do its thing.
| NB: | If nothing happens when clicking the checkbox to enable ClearType, it usually means that VBScript has been removed or has been corrupted somehow. Refer to the Windows Update Is Blank topic below for instructions on fixing it. |
DMA access is much faster and smoother than PIO access when it comes to IDE/EIDE hard drives, CD-ROM drives, DVD drives, etc. Despite this fact, Windows XP often defaults to PIO access unnecessarily at installation and, worse, is all too quick to revert to PIO access whenever anything goes wrong. To configure your drives for DMA access manually, consult Microsoft's Knowledge Base Article 310751, Device Settings Are Hard to Find in Windows XP.
Internet Explorer 6 is a royal pain in the rear insofar as it allows the user to neither uninstall nor reinstall it. This wouldn't be a problem were the application not so fragile, but the rotten thing breaks easier than most china. The only way I've found to force IE6 to reinstall is by taking the following steps.
This is a lovely little problem, and by 'lovely' I mean ugly as sin. You see, Microsoft apparently thought it would be a good idea for the performance monitoring stuff to avoid loading any of the relevant libraries if anything goes wrong. That's fine with me. What isn't so peachy is that (1) plenty of things that shouldn't be a problem are, (2) Windows XP buries the notifications in the application and/or system event logs, and—trust me, you're going to love this one—(3) the offending libraries are disabled whenever they break.
In other words, any number of things can prevent a performance monitoring library from loading, the associated error messages are buried in the event log, and the operating system will never bother to load the offending library again! Isn't that special? Seriously, Microsoft programmers must stay up late into the night to come up with such idiotic behaviors. It had me tearing out my hair until I came across a utility from Microsoft designed to address this issue.
In my case, I had disabled the system paging file altogether because I had more than enough memory to do so and wondered if it might increase performance. This resulted in the PerfOS library failing to load, which resulted in all the processor performance counters going AWOL. I fixed it by using the aforementioned utility to re-enable the PerfOS library. I also had to re-enable the system paging file as well; otherwise, the PerfOS library would break again every time at startup.
There are some very helpful programs out there for fiddling about with the Windows XP user interface. The must-have tools/bookmarks, in my estimation, are as follows.
The most common reason that Windows Update remains blank is that the VBScript component on which it relies has been removed or corrupted somehow. For further help with this issue, consult Microsoft's Knowledge Base Article 193701, WINUP: Blank Page When You Try to Access Windows Update.