KSPAdmins

I'm coming to the conclusion it's definitely an AB Tutor issue - I eventually realised it was only happening when I tried to unlock the PC whilst shadowing it. Once the PC is imaged we usually reapply all the latest drivers back to the machine but it's possible there's something that currently disagrees with AB Tutor. Guess we'll have to chalk this one up to experience and avoid doing things this way; it's not like we do it that often. I might find a solution at some point, but at least it's not insurmountable. Thanks all.

One further thing I've noticed is that it tends to coincide with Windows Updates, whether checking for them or actually installing them. I'd have thought an i3 processor and 4GB of RAM would have been able to cope with a couple of dozen or so updates...

We've got good old-fashioned wired keyboards and mice, which should (ha!) be more stable, but this issue has got us stumped. As I've said, AB Tutor won't even touch them once it's happened. We're trying to find solutions we can push out via registry or GP as we have 500+ computers and don't fancy logging on to all of them...

Bit of a weird one, this. Occasionally just recently we have had an issue with users being logged on, leaving their PCs for a while, and then not being able to unlock them when they come back. The keyboard is fine (to an extent) - still capable of turning NumLock on and off - and changing USB port or indeed keyboard while the machine is locked has no effect. The mouse still functions as normal. Some people online have suggested that it may be USB Selective Suspend at play, but that's never been a problem in the past 4 years that we've been running Windows 7. Also, the really odd thing about it is that you can't even send a Ctrl-Alt-Del signal to the machine from AB Tutor (v7.3.10, by the way) - it just flatly refuses to unlock. AB Tutor will happily reboot or shutdown the PC, though. I've only seen it happen so far on newer Dell Optiplexes - 390/3010/3020 models. Has anyone else had this issue, or am I just going quietly mad by myself? Daryl

We've been having the same problem since switching to Smoothwall a month ago (the teachers have been going up the wall, bless 'em - seems they can't teach without YouTube these days). The HTTPS solution works a treat, thanks - the beauty of it being that the kids can't use the workaround

V4 profile didn't work. Exactly the same problem - no Office document attachment from an external source (we've pinned it down to that) will open without Protected Views turned OFF, giving a "file corrupted" message each time. So much for enhanced security...

Interesting article, thank you. He only logs on to his Windows 8.1 PC - a new profile would have been created Monday night or yesterday morning, after all the updates went on. However, it's a Profile.V2 folder that's been created. The registry entry mentioned in the article doesn't exist on the PC in question, so do you think it would be worth adding it and redoing his profile again? -- Edit -- He does log on to W7 - we think he uses the laptop we have in the school hall to do assemblies. Might even have done so yesterday morning. Definitely going to try the Profile.V4 thing now.

Sadly not. He must have been busy elsewhere yesterday - just had an email telling me all the gremlins are back. Attachments won't open from Outlook (Office thinks they're corrupt) and some of the Add-ons are playing up. Guess I'm going to have to remove Office's file protection settings again, leaving the PC open to attack. Splendid.

75 minutes and 1.8GB of updates later, plus a roaming profile reset, and things have gone very quiet. I'm hoping this is a good sign. I'm now setting up a laptop with a clean install of Windows 8.1 to play with it properly...

Well, I'm biting the bullet later on today and throwing every single update available at Office 2013 on the PC in question. Its latest niggle is that it won't let the user save an old version of an Excel file in the new format. I've followed every suggestion the software has put forward with regard to file blocking for curing this, and it still doesn't work. It's getting a bit embarrassing, to be honest...

SP1 is installed, yes. The two of us only just got Office 2013 installed across 500 PCs over the summer 'holiday' (manually, we're not very sophisticated), and we really only had time to install it up to SP1 (with a few exceptions which we've since taken further). Stability issues aside, it's the whole security thing that puzzles us - the Windows 7 (tested to destruction) installations require no tinkering, while the single Windows 8.1 (flung on at the last minute) PC we have needs all the Office Trust Centre file protection switching off for it to function properly, even opening older versions of Office documents. Almost daily the Head is finding something else it won't do - of all the people in an organisation to have as a guinea pig, the big boss is rarely your best candidate...

Yes, it was fully patched, but we actually reinstalled it thinking something had gone wrong with the installation, so it's now patched up to the same point the fully working Windows 7 copies are. If there was ever a point where we could actuallly get at the machine to repatch it (the Head works far longer hours than we do, it seems), we'd try, but I still don't think it would work as it didn't work before. On the subject of Office 2013 bugs though, we've had to get the staff to disable COM Addins and hardware acceleration to make Excel in particular more stable, and that's with the latest updates on selected PCs. My Network Manager is reluctant to send out all the Office patches via WSUS as there are so many it's likely to kill the system. On reflection though, it may be a project for October half-term, whether we like it or not...

Hi, Our new Headteacher has asked for the PC on his desk to run Windows 8.1 'out-of-the-box', despite us running a stable and well tested Windows 7 across the board. We have given him Office 2013 (same as on the Windows 7 PCs) but it seems normal rules don't apply in Windows 8.1 - we have pretty much had to remove every security (Trust Centre) setting known to man to get Office documents to open from Outlook attachments without corruption messages, and to open files from older versions of Office on this one PC. We are aware of certain stability issues in Office 2013, but we think we have pinned most of them down to running Smart Notebook 11 (don't get me started on that one...), but the Head's PC isn't running any Smart software, and the Windows 7 PCs have no Trust Centre settings turned off at all. Could it be Group Policy settings made for Windows 7 interfering with Windows 8.1? I'm no expert in this field but I can't think of anything else, and the frustration is starting to set in! Any suggestions woud be much appreciated. Daryl

It's not something we tried, but thanks for the suggestion. We kind of assumed that the Volume Mixer was running, as it was showing up in the system tray, but just wouldn't do anything for the kids. All we've got to do now is kill Quicktime without uninstalling it, which it would appear isn't as easy as it sounds!

400? If only... Nah, we're cheapskates - bog standard Dell keyboards, no extraneous buttons for the kids to play with!

This issue seems to have fixed itself, in a way. We were having another problem with QuickTime having taken over all the media plugins for IE9 so we re-jigged the user profiles to accept Windows Media Player as the default, and volume control is now functioning again. Still not sure how it broke in the first place though... All just part of the great Windows 7 network deployment learning curve, I guess!

Hi, I'm new here. Please be kind It seems that some time since before Easter our pupils have no longer been able to change the volume settings in Windows 7 SP1. The icon appears in the system tray, but clicking on it garners no response whatsoever. It doesn't seem to matter whether it's a Realtek, SoundMax or IDT, our restricted users just can't do anything. Staff and Admins are okay, although they do have access to Control Panel which the pupils don't, although this wasn't a problem in XP. It's a multipurpose (if slightly underprepared) sysprepped image that we just add the drivers back to afterwards, and works like a charm on any machine we put it on... until now... Has anyone else come across this problem lately? Regards, Daryl