There was a problem sending the command to the program

I hate error messages like that. It’s both detailed and vague at the same. What command was being sent and what was the problem? Let me back up a few steps. A family member bought a new PC running Windows 7, for his home office. He works from home and accesses his work email account through Internet Explorer.  His email based on Domino Web Access, which I’m assuming is the web bit for Lotus Notes email.

When ever he was sent a document like an Excel file or Word file as an email attachment, he was unable to open the file.  He would double-click on the icon for the file, and Domino web page would spit out “There was a problem sending the command to the program”.  He has Office 2007 installed and we verified that it was working just fine.

If he tried to save the file from Domino, he would get prompted for a folder to store the file and he would try to save it is his documents folder. It went through the motions of saving the file.  No error messages, but the file wasn’t there. I repeat, there was no error message. I took a peek at the file system and found the file in an odd location. All the files that he had been trying to launch were in “c:\users\hisname\AppData\Local\Temp\Low\Domino Web Access\80\”. The “Low” part of the folder name tells us that Internet Explorer was redirected by Windows.

Starting with Vista, IE 7 runs with “low” privileges. The temporary files, cookies, and history folders are now in “low privilege” folders. Access to protected locations (root folder, documents, “my programs”, etc) is redirected by the operating system to the %LocalAppData%\Temp\Low folder. The folder virtualization that Vista/Win7 uses is pretty transparent the application. Unless the application checks for the file after it writes it (or knows about folder virtualization), it will not know that the file is in a different location. That explains why the files were not in the right location, but we still needed to figure out why they couldn’t be launched by the browser.

After a bit of searching, I figured out the problem. He just needed to add the webmail server site as a “Trusted Site” in the Internet Explorer security options. With Windows 7, he needed to do the following steps in Internet Explorer 8:

1. From “Tools” menu, select “Internet Options”.
2. On the “Security” tab, click “Trusted site” in the “Select a zone to view or change security settings.” panel.
3. Click the “Sites” button.
4. Under the “Add this website to the zone:”, enter the URL for the web mail site and click the “Add” button.
5. If the URL starts with HTTP instead of HTTPS, make sure that the “Require server verification (https:) for all sites in this zone.” check box is cleared.
6. Press the “Close” button.
7. Press the “OK” button.

That will tell Internet Explorer that it’s safe to launch binary applications from the web mail application. It’s sounds annoying, but it’s just Microsoft trying to keep rogue web sites from running nasty programs.

Resolving "Navigation to the webpage was canceled" with Compiled HTML Help files (.chm)

I'm working with a SDK from a vendor that we have partnered with.  They provide the SDK as a download that I grabbed over FTP with Internet Explorer.  The SDK has a .NET assembly to use, some sample code, and documentation in a .chm help file.  It's all neatly bundled in a .zip files, nothing too esoteric.

Since Windows directly supports .zip files, I used Windows Explorer (Windows 7) to copy the files from the .zip file to new folder.  I then launched the help to examine some new functions the vendor had added for me.  The help file loaded up, but I couldn’t access anything.  It looked like this:



At first I thought the file was corrupt, but then I realized what was going on.  With Windows Explorer, I selected the .chm file and right-clicked on it and selected “Properties”.



If you look at the section that is highlighted in green, you’ll see the text ”This file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer.”.  With Windows XP SP2 and later operating systems, the file’s zone information is being stored with the file as stream.  A stream is a separate resource stored with the file, just not exactly in the file.  Separate resource streams is a feature of the NTFS file system.  Since the .zip file had been downloaded with Internet Explorer, the .chm file was treated as if it had been downloaded directly. 

This is actually a good thing.  By default Internet Explorer will not let you run content from your local disk without your expressed acceptance.  Since the Internet Explorer rendering engine is used to render the pages of the .chm file, it’s going to block pages that came from the Internet Zone.

You have a couple of ways of fixing this.  One way would to disable the blocking of local content.  I don’t think that’s a safe way to operate so I’m not going to describe how to do that.  In the file Properties dialog, there is an “Unblock” button.  Click that button and you can remove the Zone block.

Another way would be to use a command line tool and remove the Zone Identifier resource stream.  SInce NTFS file streams pretty much invisible to the casual eye, you can grab a free tool to trip that data out for you.  Mark Russinovich’s Sysinternals collection of utilities includes a nice little gen called streams.  It’s a handy little utility.  It will list what streams are associated with a file or folder and you delete them.  Recursively and with wild cards too.  One of the thinks I like about Systinternal command line tools is that you can run them without a parameter to get a brief description of what it does and how to use it:

Streams v1.56 - Enumerate alternate NTFS data streams
Copyright (C) 1999-2007 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

usage: \utils\SysInternals\streams.exe [-s] [-d] 
-s     Recurse subdirectories
-d     Delete streams

When I ran streams on my .chm file, I saw the following:

streams.exe SomeSdk.chm

Streams v1.56 - Enumerate alternate NTFS data streams
Copyright (C) 1999-2007 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

C:\dev\SomeSdk.chm:
:Zone.Identifier:$DATA       26

You can also get a listing of the resource streams if you use the “/R” parameter with the DIR command. To see the contents of the stream, you can open it with notepad with syntax like this:

notepad MySdk.chm:Zone.Identifier

That would display something like this:

[ZoneTransfer]
ZoneId=3

Any value of 3 or higher would be considered a remote file.  So I ran it one more time, just with the –d parameter and got this:

streams.exe -d SomeSdk.chm

Streams v1.56 - Enumerate alternate NTFS data streams
Copyright (C) 1999-2007 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

C:\dev\SomeSdk.chm:
Deleted :Zone.Identifier:$DATA

Once I did that, my help file was unblocked and ready to be used.

You should have WinPatrol on your system

You really should have WinPatrol installed on your system.  It’s a service type of application that monitors changes to your system.  For example, if an app tries to register a web browser toolbar, WinPatrol will warn you and give you a chance to block it.  There’s a free version and a paid version.  The free version is very good, but you’ll want the paid version.  It’s very affordable and will keep your machine from being bogged down with crapware and suspicious processes.  WinPatrol is written and supported by Bill Pytlovany, a well known Windows security professional.

I just installed the MyHeritage Family Tree Builder desktop application on my main development box.  I’ve been using FTB for a few years on our shared family PC.  It’s a nice genealogy application that I have used to to publish my mother’s family tree online.  The technology is very cool and I will get back to describing it in more depth.

When I installed the FTB app, the installer asked if I wanted to change the default search provider to one provided by MyHeritage and to install a MyHeritage toolbar into Internet Explorer.  I declined both options.  I have IE set to use Bing as the default search provider and I didn’t want to change it.  I also did not want to install any toolbars into IE.

I avoid IE toolbars like they are the plague.  They eat up screen real estate, slow down the browsing experience, are the root cause of 70% of the browser crashes, and cause cancer in lab rats.  So I declined that option and installed FTB.  And the installer ignored my choices and tried to change the search provider and install their toolbar anyways. I don’t know if that was sloppy coding and testing on their part or it was intentional.  Either way, that wasn’t what I wanted.

How did I know this?  Because WinPatrol was doing it’s job and warned me about each change.  I saw a dialog that looked remarkably like this:



Scotty (the mascot and public face of WinPatrol) caught the attempt of the installer to register a new toolbar.  The “New Program Alert” dialog will display enough information about the pending change to your system that you can usually make a quick and informed decision on whether or not to block it.  If you see something you don’t recognize, clicking the “PLUS Info…” dialog will take you to a WinPatrol web page that will display more information about the object being installed.

Without WinPatrol, I would not have caught either change until the next time I started Internet Explorer.  With the MyHeritage stuff, it wasn’t malicious code, but it was code that I didn’t want to run.  And thanks to WinPatrol, it wasn’t going to run. I was able to prevent changes being made to IE, and that’s worth the price of admission.

Monitoring changes to IE is not the only thing in WinPatrol’s arsenal.  It gives you an easy way to see what apps are set to start when the computer boots up and the means to block them.  If you computer seems to be running slower and slower each day, the odds are you picked up some process that run in the background.  Most of them are pretty harmless, but when you start adding them up, they will show down your PC.  WinPatrol has an online database and can identify most of them and tell you if you should keep them running or block them.

Why are there randomly named folders with mpavdlta.vdm files on my C: drive?

I was looking for a folder on a PC at home (Vista, 32 bit) when I saw a bunch of folders with oddly formed filenames.  There were 13 of them, with names and dates like this:

05/15/2010  03:34 AM    <DIR>          2f934881647646785dbf842f86e91ec9
11/01/2009  03:24 AM    <DIR>          3b9e7b6e4c58a68b7e71c5e3
11/03/2009  04:18 AM    <DIR>          54693b59d80daf1421b7dda39a
10/31/2009  03:16 AM    <DIR>          56d6fe71d579ef79995fee64834082

They all had files with the name “mpavdlta.vdm” and every time I tried to open the folder with Windows Explorer, i would get the following dialog:





I would press the “Continue” button and would have to answer “Continue” to the UAC dialog that would pop up on the screen.

Ok, so what are these files, what are they doing here, and can I remove them? 

After a bit of searching, I found that they are the AntiSpyware definition files from the Microsoft Security Essentials antivirus application.  That answered the first question.  More precisely, they are the delta files for the antivirus definitions.  There is also a mpvabase.vdm, which is the base signature file.  The mpavdlta has all of the changes since the last mpvabase was downloaded. Gilham Consulting has a nice blog post that describes the various AV definition files that come with MSE.

As for how they got there, it appears to be a bug or design flaw with MSE.  The last randomly named folder from MSE was dated 5/26/2010, a good three months ago.  I fired up the the MSE console and it displayed that the virus definitions were current as of 8/21/2010.




My first guess was that situation was causing the vdm files and folders being created all over my C: drive has been addressed.  With Windows Explorer, I went in and was able to delete most, but not all of the folders.  It appears that MSE is still doing the random folder thing.  But I was able to clear out most of them. So it looks like this is bug in the current release.  From the various posts in the MSE forums, it appears that MS is aware of the problem, but nothing official has been posted about a resolution.

I think it’s a bit odd that MSE is storing the AV definition files in this manner.  I’ve been pretty happy with how MSE is protecting my PC from virus attacks.  I wouldn’t call it perfect, but it’s more than good enough for my needs.  It’s a much lighter load on the system than the commercial AV solutions.  I can put up with a few randomly named folders for the protection that it provides, but I would be more comfortable of the files had been shoved in a folder under %ALLUSERSPROFILE% as a default location.  I’ll file this under “Nothing to see here, move along”.

Using robocopy with Visual Studio 2008 Post-build events

I have a solution that has about 15 odd projects in it.  It’s for an application that has multiple optional services with shared assemblies.  Hence the 15 projects.  I have an installer that lets the user pick from which of the optional bits to install.  For ease of maintenance, I version the installer with multiple folders.  Each version gets a folder for the installer source and a folder for the installable bits.

With Visual Studio, the default way of building a solution is to put the compiled assemblies and dependant files inside a bin folder for each project.  Each bin folder can multiple folders for different build options (debug, release, platform, etc).  I wanted a simple way of consolidating the files from each bin folder to a common folder for the installer.

I didn’t want to set the output path, from the Build tab on the project options page.  While I could direct all of the compiled output to a single folder, that would send symbol and vshost files over as well.  I didn’t want those files.  I only wanted just what I actually needed for deployment.

I decided on using the Post-build event for each project and copy only the files that I wanted.  I had already created a “deploy” folder from the solution root folder.  So I defined a build event with the following command line:

robocopy $(TargetDir) $(SolutionDir)Deploy *.exe *.dll

If you don’t know robocopy, it’s a powerful file and folder copy command line.  It’s been around for years in one Microsoft SDK or another and has been included as part of the OS since at least Vista.  In it’s simplest form, you specify the source folder, the destination folder.  It has a slew of options.

$(TargetDir) is a macro that represents the complete path for folder that the compiled units are created in, like bin\debug\ or bin\release\.  The $(SolutionDir) macro is the path to the solution folder.

I went to build one of the projects in the solution and it failed on the Post-build event.  Error 1, it said.  I copied the robocopy command line from the error message and ran it from a cmd prompt.  It executed without any errors and did exactly wat it was suppsoed to do.  After a little digging, I found out that robocopy returns 1 as an exit code to indicate success.  Since the dawn of time (January 1, 1970), command line programs have returned 0 for the exit code to indicate success and any other value to indicate an error.  It’s a bizarre flaw with an otherwise very useful tool.

Visual Studio 2008 does not appear to have any way of ignoring the exit code.  Well that’s just ducky.  So what I did was to bury the exit code in an unmarked grave so that Visual Studio 2008 wouldn’t be able to see or complain about it.  I created a batch file in the solution root folder and named it robopip.cmd.  Robopip has the following contents:

robocopy %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 /R:1 /XF *vshost*
dir %TEMP% >nul

The first line executes the robocopy command with up to 8 parameters passed in by the build process.  The “/R:1” parameter basically says try once and then die.  The “/XF *vshost*” tells robocopy to ignore any file with “vshost” in the same.  The second line is crucial, it’s basically a low impact command to clear the last exit code.  We ask for the directory listing of the user’s temp folder and then toss away the results.  There is probably a more elegant way of clearing the error code, that was the first one that worked for me.

So now, I can use the following Post-event build command with each project.

$(SolutionDir)robopip $(TargetDir) $(SolutionDir)Deploy *.exe *.dll

I get the power of RoboCopy without Visual Studio squawking about the exit code.

Blocking spam that appears to come from your own email address

At work, I get a lot of email where the sender has spoofed the email address so that it appears to come my work email address.  It’s annoying and our corporate email filter doesn’t catch it.  I did find a way to block it with a close to 100% success rate.  What I did was to create an email filter in the email application that traps those messages.  I’m using Outlook 2007, but the technique should would work for any email client that has decent filtering.  Here’s how I created the rule (using an obviously fake email address of a known spammer):

1.       From the Tools menu, select “Rules and Alerts…”

2.       From the “Rules and Alerts…” dialog, press the  “New Rule…” button.

3.       Under “Start from a blank rule” section, select “Check messages when they arrive” template.

4.       Under the dialog for “Which condition(s) do you want to check?”, select "with specific words in the message header"

5.       Click on “specific words” to open the dialog box that allows you to enter the search criteria.  I entered the following list, you would enter what matches your junk email and each line is entered in separately:
X-Barracuda-Envelope-From: sanford.wallace@spamking.com

From: <sanford.wallace@spamking.com>

6.       After closing this dialog, press “Next”

7.       On the “What do you want to do with the message?” dialog, select the following actions:
mark it as read

clear the Message Flag

move it the specified folder

8.       Click on "specified" and select the "Junk E-mail" folder.

9.       Click the “Next” button to the Finish rule setup dialog.

10.   Name the rule and set "Turn on this rule".  There is also a checkbox “Run this rule on messages already in “Inbox”.  You can set that checkbox to test the new rule.  If you have lots of messages in your inbox, create a new folder and copy some of the spam into that folder.  Then select that folder and edit the rule.  The “Run this rule…” checkbox will now list the name of the selected mail folder.  Your rule will run much faster on a mail folder with just a few times in it.

 

As you edit the settings, Outlook will display a text representation of the rule as you configure it.  It should look something like this:

Apply this rule after the message arrives
with ‘X-Barracuda-Envelope-From: sanford.wallace@spamking.com or From: <sanford.wallace@spamking.com>‘ in the message header
clear the message flag
  and move it to the Junk E-Mail folder
  and mark it as read

You may need to tweak the rule a bit to match the right messages, but it’s fairly robust.  If you want to allow email from your own address, add an exception to the rule and have the exception match some specific text in your message header or your email signature.

When Page Up and Page Down behave oddly in FireFox

I was viewing a web page with Firefox 3.5.2 the other day and I noticed the Page Up and Page Down keys were not behaving the right way.  Instead of scrolling, the page would flash a bit, but nothing really would happen.  I could still scroll with the mouse, but it bugged me.  Bugged me a lot.

I did a bit of searching and discovered an odd little feature.  Select “Options…” from the “Tools” menu.  On the “Advanced tab”, select “General”.  There is an option, “Always use the cursor keys to navigate within pages”.  If that option is set, the cursor keys can be used to select text on the page instead of navigating the page.

By default, that option is not set.  However, you can toggle it on and off by pressing the F7 key.  And I must have pressed that key at some point and toggled that feature on.  Once I cleared that setting, I could use the Page Up and Page Down keys to navigate the page again.

Using uberOptions to extend the functionality of Logitech devices

A few weeks ago, I picked up some Logitech mice that were on sale as “dented box” items on the Logitech site.  They were new mice, but their boxes had some minor damage and they were half off.  I grabbed a VX Revolution and a MX Revolution.  The VX was for the family computer that the kids use, and the MX was for my home development machine.  The VX is a notebook model and it’s smaller size fits the kids hands quite nicely.

The MX Revolution was to replace my MX 700 mouse that I’ve had a few years. The 700 was one of the best mice I have ever used, but I had some issues with it.  First off, Logitech did not provide Vista drivers for it. While it worked just fine with Vista, it was only as a standard mouse and the extra buttons could not be used.  The other problem was that the rechargeable batteries had worn out to the point there they would only last for a few minutes.  I could easily find replacement batteries, but I missed the extra functionality of the 700.  Plus I wanted a mouse where the mouse wheel with the “tilt” support for left/right scrolling.

From time to time, Logitech runs “dented box” sales on various products.  If you have right coupon code, you can get a new product with a full warranty.  If you use the site techbargains.com, type “dented logitech” into the search box on the main page, you’ll get a list of the current dented box specials on the Logitech site, plus coupon codes for additional savings.

Both the VX and MX Revolution mice have a little button located just south of the scroll wheel.  By default, it’s mapped to a search function.  Select a word, press the button, and a new browser instance is launched with the selected word passed the search engine.  For some people that may be a cool feature, but I found it just maddening.  With the Logitech SetPoint software that comes with each mouse, you can reassign the mouse button functionality to other behavior.  On the VX, I was able to set the search button to be a middle click button.  I like being able to middle click a link on a web site and get that link opened in a new tab, leaving the existing web page right it I was reading it.

You would think that you could do the same thing with the MX Revolution as you could with the VX Revolution. Oddly enough, while you could assign the middle click function to many of the buttons on the MX, it was not an option for the search button.  I don’t know if that was by design or by error, but it was irritating.  Since the SetPoint configuration software is bundled with all of the current Logitech input devices, the button definitions are not hard coded into the application, but must be read from some set of configuration files.  If I could find where they are located, I should be able to copy the missing MX definitions from the VX settings.

I went on to Logitech’s support forums in search of tips for locating and editing the SetPoint files.  After doing some searching, I found references to something called uberOptions. Rich Owens put together a package called uberOptions, a new set of SetPoint configuration files that greatly expand the options that you can assign to the buttons.  He has modified the files for a large list of keyboards, mice, and trackballs.  The current list of devices plus the installer for uberOptions can be found at http://uberoptions.net/.  It installed and worked just fine with WIndows 7 64 bit.  After I installed it, his default setting for mouse had mapped the search button to the middle click function.  Well played Rich, well played indeed.

[Edited on 8/31/2009]
If Rich Owens’ main site is down, he has a mirror site.

[Edited on 9/8/2009]
Richard Owens sent in an updated link to his site, http://uberoptions.net/, this replaces http://www.mstarmetro.net/users/rlowens/.

A work around for Delphi 2007/2009 with Windows 7 64 bit

I just installed Windows 7, 64 bit edition so that I could code and test against this new operating system.  Visual Studio 2008 installed and ran without any incident, but I hit a snag with Delphi 2007.  Delphi 2007 installed just fine, but it would die when you ended a debugging session.  An assert error would get thrown and after you cleared the dialog, Delphi would be terminated.
The error was thrown by bordbk105N.dll and had the following text:

Assertion failure: "(!"SetThreadContext failed")"
in ..\win32src\thread32.cpp at line 412
Continue execution?

That was followed by a “Yes/No” set of buttons.  It didn’t matter which choice you made, it was pretty much game over for Delphi at this point. After getting this happen 3 times in a row (even with Delphi launched with “Run As Administrator”), I decided to check the Internet and see if this was unique to me and if there was a fix.
I checked Google and found a few hits.  One of them led me to a blog written by Olaf Monien, a German developer with close ties to the Delphi R & D department.  His post, “Delphi 2009 / Windows 7 / 64 bit Debugger Crash Workaround”, described the issue in great detail.  Apparently an incorrect call is being made to the SetThreadContext API call.  The debugger dll has an assert call based on the return value SetThreadContext().  It’s odd that production code went out with asserts enable, that’s usually used during testing.  Some people traced through the debugger code and found that if a single byte is changed in the dll, you could get by this error.  This byte changes the logic so it ignores the return code from SetThreadContext() and never hits the assert code.  You can read about how they came up with that idea here.
An enterprising programmer named “LordByte” wrote a handy little utility that will patch the debugger dll for both Delphi 2007 and Delphi 2009.  Olaf is hosting the patch tool on his blog and This file found a permanent home at Embarcadero and you can download it from Delphi_2007_2009_WOW64_Debugger_Fix.zip.  This works but you now have the added risk of actual errors being returned from that call to SetThreadContext() being ignored.  Since the alternative is an unusable Delphi, it’s a risk I’m going to have to take.

[Edited April 22nd, 2013]
While I no longer use Delphi, I hate to see a broken link.  I updated the download link for the debugger patch to it's current home at Embarcadero.

Getting back the Ctrl-N shortcut with SQL Server 2008’s SSMS

After I installed SQL Server 2008, I noticed that the Ctrl-N keyboard shortcut in the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) no longer worked.  What it’s supposed to do is to open up a new query tab.  In my install of SSMS 2008, the Ctrl-N key did nothing.  Pressing Ctrl-N was burned into my brain. It was a serious context switch for me to have to select a menu item or press a button to get a new query tab. 

A friend of mine gave me a simple tip that fixed it.  Change the keyboard layout to “SQL Server 2000” and then back to “Standard” and that will restore the default keyboard mappings.  That fixed it and I belatedly found it documented here, here and here.  I don’t know why I didn’t check the series of tubes for the answer, it was pretty obvious how to fix it.

To change the keyboard mappings, select Tools->Options from the SSMS menu and then go to Environment->Keyboard.  From that spot, you can change the keyboard layout.  Change the layout and press the “Ok” button to save the changes.  Then, repeat the steps and select the standard layout and press “Ok” again.  That will set the default keyboard mappings, which will include the Ctrl-N mapping.

Resetting the mouse cursor

Some app on my XP development PC left the mouse cursor stuck in the “move” state.  The mouse was behaving correctly, but it was stuck in move image, the one with the four direction arrows.  Normally, the mouse cursor is application specific.  One the apps is coloring outside the lines and the cursor image was stuck for all of the running applications.  I’m using a beta version of a Twitter client app, it’s the obvious suspect, but I still need to prove that.

I couldn’t figure out which app was doing this and I was in the middle of editing some code and I didn’t want to break my concentration by restarting everything.  So I decided to address the symptom and not the problem.  The question is how to do you reset the mouse cursor?

First, I tried the simple solution and just removed the mouse.  It’s plugged into a USB port on my monitor so I just turned off the monitor and turned it back on.  After coming back on, the mouse still had the wrong cursor.  What I did next was to bring up the Mouse applet in the control panel.  I selected the “Pointers” tab and it was obvious that something was a little off.  On this tab, you can select the theme to associate with the nouse cursors and the preview display shows the “move” cursor image for each possible mouse cursor image. 

I selected another theme and then went back to the current theme.  Now the preview showed the correct images.  I clicked the “Apply” button and the mouse was back to normal.  There’s probably a command line for doing this, but I’m not going to spend the cycles looking for it unless this happens again.

What to do when an antivirus vendor has flagged your software as a virus

I usually don’t talk about where I work, this is my personal blog and where I work really doesn’t matter to the content of blog posts.  This post is a little different, it’s work related and knowing where I work adds some needed context.  I’m a senior software engineer for Tyler Technologies, in their VersaTrans Solution. The VersaTrans product line provides school transportation software and services for the K-12 schools.

About a month ago, I came into work to find people waiting at my cubical.  That’s usually not a good way to start off a morning, and it wasn’t.  Apparently McAfee pushed out a virus definition file out the night before and it was flagging our software as a trojan.  Two of our executable files were being flagged.  Our customers were calling in to our technical support department, and they were understandably concerned.  The McAfee antivirus software wanted to quarantine our applications.  That would prevent our customers from using our applications, which is not a good thing.  They use our bus routing and planning software on a daily basis.  Not being able to use our software can cause a lot of problems for a school’s transportation department.  We needed to immediately resolve this.  I usually don’t get involved with technical support issues, but I had the bandwidth to immediately jump on this problem.

The immediate order of business was to replicate the actions of the A/V software.  We wanted to make sure that our software was being actually being flagged before we reported it to McAfee.  We don’t use any of the McAfee products in house, so one of our QA specialists (David) started downloading a trial copy of McAfee’s Enterprise solution.  This is the application that our clients were reporting that they were using.  David would install that copy into a virtual machine and test it in an isolated environment.

Thursday, 10:00am.  I decided to save some time and upload a copy of our application to my home PC.  I have a copy of the home version of the McAfee A/V product.  It comes free as part of my FiOs package.  I’ve been planning on removing it and replacing it with one of the free A/V products, but fortunately it was still installed.  Sure enough, the app was flagged as “BackDoor-AWQ.svr.gen.e”, which is some type of generic server type of trojan that was added to version 5460 of the McAfee A/V database.  Version 5460 was the one that had been just pushed out to all of McAfee’s clients.  David would eventually duplicate the A/V hit, but it would take a while.  Armed with immediate proof from my home PC, I could proceed to the next step.  By the way, it can be very handy to be able securely access your home PC from your office PC.

10:15am.  I made my initial call to McAfee.  I went was passed to several CSRs, most of them refused to provide any identification other than their first name.  With each CSR, I was asked for a “grant number”, which was some form of customer identifier.  With each CSR I needed to explain that I was not calling as a McAfee customer, but as a representative of Tyler Technologies and they were false identifying our software as malware.  Each CSR tried to redirect me to their home product support.  With each CSR, I would request to speak with their supervisor when it became obvious that I would not get the support.

10:30am. I spoke with “Mike”, who identified himself as Corporate Service Program Supervisor.  He refused to escalate the issue or provide a last name and phone number.  Once again, I asked to speak to his supervisor.  He did not want to do this and we went back and forth a few times and I was persistent.  He finally transferred me to their Consumer Customer Department and provided that phone number (866-622-3911) with great reluctance.

10:30-10:42am.  Waited on hold.

While I was on hold, our sales department sent out a mass email to all of our clients.  The email explained that McAfee was falsely identifying our application as a virus and they should not be alarmed and that we were working with McAfee to remedy the situation.  As soon as you can reliably identify that some version of your software is being falsely flagged as a virus, contact your customers.  Trust me, they will appreciate it.

10:42am. Spoke to another CSR who couldn’t help resolve the problem, but could transfer me to someone who would be able to help.

10:45-11:00am.  Waited on hold.

11:01-11:30am. I reached a CSR named Juan at the Dallas office of McAfee.  Juan’s title is Tier III Customer Service and he provided me with his direct phone number and email address.  He asked me to submit a copy of the file being flagged to a web site that they provide for online scanning of files.  This is McAfee Avert® Labs WebImmune and is located at https://www.webimmune.net/default.asp.   I registered an account on their site and tried to upload the Routing and Planning (RP) executable known to trigger the McAfee scanner.  I was unable to upload the file because the RP executable is 7.7MB in size and WebImmue would only accept files up to 3MB in size.  Our executable is pre-compressed and there isn’t any other method of shrinking the size down to below 3MB.  This 3MB limitation basically defeats the purpose of having that site.

I then tried emailing the file to Juan, but our own email server blocked the email because of the file attachment.  That’s bad on our part, but there is more than one way to email a file.

11:45am.  I emailed the file to Juan via my personal Hotmail account.  It took a while to make it to Juan, but by 3:00PM, I had an email confirmation from Juan that he had received the file.

11:58am.  I received an email from Juan with the following text:

Mr. Miller,

I just received an email in regards to the issue that you are currently facing.

An issue that was incorrectly indentifying some large applications executables files as Backdoor.awq.svr.gen.e has been resolved.

Attached is an ED to suppress this detection. We have tested the ED against the limited number of files we have received thus far. If the ED doesn't work and DAT 5461 hasn't shipped then please gather a sample (FTP site in pwd protected zip if larger than 3mb) and escalate via MSTeg.

I forwarded the message to David in QA.  David had set up a virtual machine with a trial version of the McAfee Enterprise virus scanner and could duplicate the problem using the 5460 DAT file.  The “ED” supplied by Juan did not fix the problem, but I am not 100% certain that we had installed it correctly.  Their ED file did not come with any instructions on how to install it and we I promptly notified Juan that it was still a problem for us.

3:00pm.  Juan emailed me to notify me that he had received the RP executable from my Hotmail account and he requested a copy of the other executable that was being falsely identified (Ascii Scheduler).  I immediately sent him that file from my Hotmail account.  I did not receive emails from Juan (or any other McAfee representative) after that point.  Both files share about 98% of the same code, I was pretty sure if they fixed the scanner for one of them, it would be fixed for the other.  Especially since we were not the only company affected.  Juan wouldn’t tell me who else had been false identified, but he hinted that they were big companies and they were not happy.

Friday 9:00am.  I was told by our QA Manage that DAT version 5461 was pushed out by McAfee overnight and it no longer flags our files as false positives.  We received many happy emails from clients thanking us for the prompt attention paid to the matter.

So what do you do if this happens to you?  I recommend doing the following when a customer reports that your software is being flagged as a virus:

• Ask the customer for the product name and version number of the antivirus software.  If possible, get the version number and date of the virus database used by the software.  Start taking detailed notes during this process.  You want an audit trail to give your boss to explain where your day went, plus it gives you ammunition when you get stuck with a CSR that wont help your or escalate your call.
• Ask for the name of the virus or trojan that your software is being flagged as.
• Get the version number of your executable that is being flagged as a virus.
• Get a trial version of the A/V software and attempt to duplicate the false positive match.  If you can not duplicate the results, ask the client to send a password encrypted zip archive of the executable being flagged.  You have to consider the possibility that the client’s machine has been infected with a virus and that your application was infected on the client’s machine.  By sending it in a password encrypted zip file, it should pass through the client’s email server and your server without flagging any additional virus checks.
• Submit your executable to the A/V vendors online support.  Most of them have a web page for submitting a questionable file.  You wont get a fast response back, but when you call their support, they will ask you to do this step so you might as well get it out of the way.
• Call the A/V vendor and ask for support.  Do not identify yourself as a customer of their A/V software, but as an ISV who has been falsely identified by their software.  If you identify yourself as a customer, you may get shunted down lower priority support queue.  If you have an expensive support contract, that would be different.  Basically, just use the best tools at your disposal.
• Ask for the CSR’s name and phone number, with extension.  Tell them that you need this information to provide an audit trail for your supervisor.  Be polite but persistent.  If they can not help you, ask for their supervisor and just work your way up their chain of command until you get a CSR that can help you.
• Stay polite and professional with the CSR.  It’s not their fault that their software is falsely identifying your software as a virus.  They are more likely to expedite a remedy if you are not beating up on them.  It’s likely that you are not the only one being affected by this.
• When you have a CSR that can help you, work out a plan with target times for how to resolve this.  Let them know that you will be in phone and email contact with them until the matter is resolved.  Basically, you want to get the file or files to them and have enough time for them to test the files and work out a solution.  You do not want to be waiting for hours just to get them the file.  You will want acknowledgement when they have received the file and when they have duplicated the problem.  Your goal is to get them to issue out a new virus update file on the same day.
• Once you get the problem resolved, send a “thank you” email to the CSR that helped resolve the problem.  If the problem ever occurs again, you want to be able to start with that CSR and not have to waste time going up the CSR tree.

Having to go through all of this was not how I planned on spending my day. I lost the better part of the day dealing with McAfee’s mistake when I could have been working on my own mistakes.  This kind of stuff happens and it’s good to have a plan for dealing with it.

Dealing with meetings that run late and run into your meeting

Raymond Chen just posted a great post on his The New Old Thing blog about getting people out of a meeting room when their time is up.  You either barge right in and say “Oops! Sorry about that” and then back right out.  Or you just sit right down and apologize for being late for your own meeting.

If you are in a meeting and your time is up, it’s just proper etiquette to end the meeting if that room is booked for another meeting.  While your topic may be more important for the next meeting, making other people wait will push back everyone’s schedule.  It can ripple through the company and come back and bite you on the Blackberry..  It’s just a poor business decision to make everyone else wait.

Either politely ask if the next meeting can be be delayed a few minutes, or just book another meeting at another time to finish your stuff up.  With so many meetings include people calling in for remote offices, you really need to make an effort to keep your meeting on track.

If your one hour status meeting always seems to run 90 minutes, then you have a time management problem.  Either your meeting isn’t staying on topic, or the scope of the meeting doesn’t fit the time allotted.  Cut back on the scope or just book the room for 90 minutes.

At the last place I worked, our daily team staff meetings were “stand up” meetings.  We all stood in a quite away near our workspace, and we just stood and talked for a few minutes.  No beverages were allowed and off topic conversations were verboten.  This fails when you have remote team mates, then you would need to book a small room and everyone just stares at the conference phone.  The no sitting down and no beverage rules are still in effect.

I still think that Dave Barry said it best:

Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.

Some odd TiVo issues

I have  couple a couple of Series2 TiVo DVRs and they just received the TiVo Fall 2008 Service Update for 9.3.2.  It’s basically a few tweaks to the UI, but the odd thing was that I needed to manually restart the TiVo.  Usually the TiVo restarts itself after getting a new system update.  Very odd, but hopefully just a one time glitch.

My in-laws have a TiVO HD and sometime last week it decided to stop recording the shows on the season passes.  I went over and took a look.  The season passes were in order and when you selected view upcoming episodes, the shows would be listed, but not listed as being recorded.  Very odd.  The fix was simple, but annoying.  I selected each season pass and saved it without making any changes.  After saving the pass, the correct shows were marked as going to be recorded.  Fortunately they only had a handful of season passes, it took a minute or two to update all of them. 

After fixing the season passes, I tried to bring up YouTube on the TiVo HD.  When I selected YouTube from the menu, the TiVo froze and stopped responding.  I gave it a few minutes to figure it on it’s own and I restarted their TiVo the hard way.  Thanks to TiVo not having a reset button, I had to unplug and plug it back in again.  After waiting a few minutes to boot abck up, it was back to normal.

That was the first time I have ever had to reboot a TiVo, their software has been very stable.  As with my Series2 units, I’m hoping that this was a one time glitch caused by system updates being pushed down the to TiVo.

DevTrack woes with build 1833 of mfc80.dll

We use TechExcel’s DevTrack tool to track our defects and project modifications.  A few weeks ago, one of our QA specialists installed SQL Server 2008 Express.  That broke DevTrack.  After SQL Express 2008 was installed, DevTrack would crash after loading.  After contacting DevTrack support, we were advised that the mfc80.dll installed with SQL Express was causing the problem. 

Their suggested work around?  They asked us to overwrite the version of mfc80.dll (8.0.50727.1833) located in one of the SQL Express folders with an older one (8.0.50727.762).  Ok, there is something wrong this picture.  You don’t replace a dll in another application’s folder.  That violates the integrity of the installation of the other application.  You have no idea of what the possible consequences will be for that application.  It could work fine, it could blow up in your face, or something in between.

The problem is that when DevTrack requests mfc80.dll, it’s being redirected through the WinSxS policy files to the latest and greatest version, version 8.0.50727.1833.  And there is something in MFC 1833 that just kills DevTrack.  The problem isn’t specific to DevTrack, apparently Corel’s WinDVD has the same problem.  I read a thread about people hacking the WinSxS policy files to force calls to mfc80.dll to use an older version.  That might work under XP, but will really break things under Vista.

I thought the Side-by-Side assembly model was supposed to eliminate “DLL Hell”.  For DevTrack to work, they have two choices.  They can patch their code so that it doesn’t crash with the 1833 version of mfc80.dll, or they can install their own local copy and not use the WinSxS version.  We’ve been waiting for a few weeks for a solution, that’s been a real frustrating point.

Restoring missing Build Events in Delphi 2007

If you have a Delphi 2007 project that was ported from Delphi 2006, then you may be missing the build event project options.  The .dproj file that Delphi 2006 creates is does not have a final XML element named PropertyGroup that Delphi 2007 uses.  Without that final PropertyGroup, Delphi 2007 will not enable Build Events as an option.  If you manually edit your .dproj file, just the following lines:

  <PropertyGroup>
  </PropertyGroup>

So that the .dproj files looks like this at the end of the file:

  <PropertyGroup>
  </PropertyGroup>
</Project>

After making that change, the next time you open that project with Delphi 2007 and select Options from the Project menu, you’ll see Build Events listed.  This only appears to happen if you migrate a Delphi 2006 project over to Delphi 2007.  If you create the project from scratch, you’ll see Build Events list.  That’s how I was able to determine what was missing, I just created a new project and compared the .dproj files.

Why www.nbc.com wont load with IE7 on Vista (and how to get around it)

My kids wanted to watch the Olympic swimming events going on in Beijing.  Since NBC is streaming all the venues, I figures I would just fire up the web browser and wander over to www.nbc.com.   We have a “family” pc that everyone can use and it runs Vista Home Premimum (32-bit), with Service Pack 1 installed.  Since I knew that NBC was going to be using the Microsoft stack with Silverlight to stream the video, I figured I would have the least amount of headaches with Internet Explorer 7.  Wrong!

When I entered in http://www.nbc.com into IE, I got the following error: “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage”.  I figured I mistyped the URL, that wasn’t it.  Out of the relatively small combinations that the letters N, B, and C can be arranged, I did have the right URL.  Could it be that NBC.com was done?  Nope, I tried “ping –n 1 www.nbc.com” and received the following

Pinging a1669.g.akamai.net [128.242.186.219] with 32 bytes of data:                               
                                                                                                  
Reply from 128.242.186.219: bytes=32 time=44ms TTL=55                                             
                                                                                                  
Ping statistics for 128.242.186.219:                                                              
    Packets: Sent = 1, Received = 1, Lost = 0 (0% loss),                                          
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:                                                    
    Minimum = 44ms, Maximum = 44ms, Average = 44ms                                                 

That tells us that their site is live and responding to requests.  Just for giggles, I launched FireFox 3 and entered in the URL.  Sure enough, that worked just fine.  What was the problem with nbc.com and IE7?  I did a search with Google (and Yahoo for a change of pace) and saw that a number of people were reporting the same problem.  No one knew the cause and the only resolution was “just use Firefox”.  Normally, that would be an acceptable answer for me.  Today, I’m feeling a bit cranky and I want to know what the problem is between nbc.com and IE7.  The odds are it’s something trivial on the nbc,com side.  We haven’t had any problems with IE7 on Vista before.

I did notice that a lot of people reporting the problem had Tablet PC’s. I don’t have a Tablet PC, it’s just an plain ol’ Dell desktop.  But I did install a Wacom Bamboo tablet and installing it’s drivers did activate some user input functionality in Vista that wasn’t there before.  Why would this affect the browser?  As it turns out, when Vista thinks it’s now a Tablet PC the user agent string sent by IE changes.

Here’s the typical user-agent string sent by IE7 for various operating systems.

For Windows XP SP2: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)

For Windows 2003 Server: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2)

For Windows Vista: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)

Note, these are the base strings, different applications can change or add to these values.  On my machine, the user agent has some information:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; Tablet PC 2.0; Creative ZENcast v2.01.01)

That says that I’m running IE7 on Vista, with .NET 2, 3, and 3.5 installed.  Media Center extension are installed, it thinks it’s a Tablet PC, and I have Creative’s Zencast (a podcast download app).

Notice the text in bold, “Table PC 2.0”.  When that text is submitted to www.nbc.com as part of the user agent, the website is doing some sort of re-direct that is failing.  So we have what appears to the cause of the problem, now how do we fix it.  I tried faking out the user agent string with a download from Microsoft called the User Agent String Utility, version 2.  Don’t event bother with that one.  It opens up a new browser window that has been tweaked to report itself as IE 6.0 but that’s the only part of the user agent string that gets modified.  It still uses “Table PC 2.0”, so the problem still remains.

In theory, you can edit the list of items that get tacked on the user agent string by hacking at the registry.  With IE7, the list of fields added to the user agent string are defined as REG_SZ values in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent\Post Platform.  I tried removing “Tablet PC 2.0” from the list, but the OS kept putting it back in.  Plus, we really shouldn’t have to modify our systems, the problem is due to www.nbc.com not sniffing the user agent string correctly.

I did a little searching on the Internet and I found a working solution here.  Instead of using www.nbc.com as the starting URL, use www.nbci.com.  That site bypasses the user agent check and it allowed me to the live feeds of the Olympic events.  A very simple solution, but a typical home user would never figure it out on his own and just blame Vista for it.

How to disable the Windows Shutdown Tracker Dialog

Rick Strahl posted a great tip on how to disable the Windows Shutdown Tracker Dialog. That’s the dialog that Serer 2003 and Server 2008 make you respond to when you reboot or power down the server.  As Rick noted, usually the only time that you need to reboot a Windows Server is when you install an update from Microsoft.  It’s collecting information that you’ll never use.  You can disable that dialog by making a change in the local computer Group Policy.

To disable the dialog, do the following:

• Run the Group Policy Object Editor by typing “gpedit.msc” from the “Run…” dialog.
• Navigate down to Local Computer Policy\Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System
• Double-click on “Display Shutdown Event Tracker” and click on the “Disabled” radio button
• Click the “Ok” button to close the dialog with the new setting.
• Close the Group Policy Object Editor.

This will work for both Server 2008 and Server 2003.

Black Crayons and the school psychologist, a true story (just not mine)

I follow Raymond Chen’s blog (required reading if you program for Win32) and the other day he had a link to a story that was both hysterical and scary.  My first thought that it was another urban legend.  After a bit of searching, I tracked down the author, Deirdre Sholto-Douglas, and she confirmed that the story was true and gave me permission to repost it here.

It had been originally posted in the alt.peeves newsgroup on USENET back in 1994.  Click here for a reasonable definition of alt.peeves or here to access that group. I’ve included the text as posted, with the exception of the email addresses.  It was posted before the spammers started harvesting email addresses out of USENET and I see no reason to make these addresses public.

---

Forwarded-by: bostic@CS… (Keith Bostic)
Forwarded-by: good@p…. (Craig Good)
From: finch@M… (Deirdre Sholto-Douglas)
Newsgroups: alt.peeves

W. Blair Haworth Jr. (bhaworth@a…) wrote:
: In article 331ipk$omb@v.’.. finch@… (Deirdre
: Sholto-Douglas) writes:

: >You go ahead with your kidlessness and while you do so, I'll continue to
: >kiss skinned knees, assemble bicycles, and enthusiastically accept popsicle
: >stick 'ashtrays'. 

: Ashtrays!  Godamightydamn, things being what they are these days, I'd've
: figured that any kid that turned out an ashtray in arts'n'crafts would be
: immediately sent to Special Ed. for re-grooving and Social Services
: notified to investigate the home environment. 

<sigh> Your comment reminds me of one of the run ins I've had with the school psychologist.  After our disscussion, I've gained a reputation of being unreasonable and my daughter has gained the freedom to construct anything short of atomic bombs without psychological interference.

If I haven't peeved about this in the past, I certainly should have and if I have, I beg the readers' indulgence.

It all started shortly after my ill-fated Parent-Teacher Conference (as did my public school reputation for being unreasonable).  Within a week of this conference, I received a phone call from said 'psychologist'  requesting that I present myself in his office to discuss my daughter's 'problem'.  When questioned, he indicated that the 'problem' was different than the one the teacher and I discussed (which was not addressing adults by first name), but coyly refused to 'discuss a situtation of this magnitude over the phone'.

The following day, at the appointed time, I appeared with offspring in tow. Horrified looks resulted and said offspring was shuttled off to play in the gym.  Apparently these discussions are SECRET.

He began by folding his hands on top of his desk and wearing his 'saintly, patient' expression.  *This* is a man who has not only READ the psych books but *believes* them.

"Has Lauren appeared depressed or been behaving unusually at home?"

"No, she has not."

"Her behavior *hasn't* changed?!"

"No it hasn't.  Pardon my abruptness, but precisely *what* are you driving at?"

He is now refusing to meet my eyes and fiddling with a paperclip on the desk.  Hmmm.  I should have trundled my copy of 'Body Language' along with me.  He could have fidgeted and I could have merrily looked up all the  underlying pyschological causes. 

"Well, erm...you see, Lauren is using only black crayon when she's drawing and studies have indicated that when this occurs the child is usually depressed and attempting to deal with repressed emotions."

"Ah." 

At this point, I was having considerable difficulty repressing one of my own emotions....namely laughter.  What rocks do these nitwits crawl out from under?  Realising that my original response would be a Bad Thing, I quickly pasted my Concerned, But Amused Parental Expression on and continued:

"Have you considered asking Lauren her reasons for using black crayon?"

Shock.  Horror.  Complete dismay.  He actually began stammering.  One does NOT ask the child.  It could cause deep-seated emotional problems, stunt their growth, cause them to suffer from low self-esteem and possibly begin hanging about on street corners with gangs of second graders. 

I excused myself from his office, obstensibly to collect myself, in actuality to collect my offspring from the gym.  I arrived at said gym to find my depressed, repressed, emotionally devasted monster attempting to deal with her deep-seated frustration at not being able to reach the rings.  Was she crying, fussing or sulking?  Nope.  She was trying to negotiate with the custodialdrone for a stepladder.  At this point, I decided she was entitled to draw with black crayons the rest of her life, if that's what she wanted.

We meandered back to the office and I ignored the look of distress that was shot at me.  I parked my recombinant DNA in a chair with orders to 'Behave like a lady.' (Yeah, I know.  So sue me.)  The conference resumed, this time I addressed my questions to Lauren.

"Lauren, Mr. Shit-for-Brains indicates that you only use blackcrayon when you're drawing."

"Yeah."

"Do you *like* drawing in black?"

"No."

"Then why do you do it?"

I was treated to the expression that is reserved for humouring slightly thick parents and watched as my offspring pasted on her Mom's Old Lady But Harmless Expression:

"They make us line up in alphabetical order when they pass out the crayons.  And I'm always last in line...there's nothing left *but* black!"

I turned to witness what our psychological brainchild is making of all this.  He has gone strangely quiet.  Fine.  This interview is over as far as I'm concerned. Although I confess, I couldn't resist lobbing one more over the fence at him.

"Thank you sooooo much for your concern regarding my daughter's emotional well-being.  I suppose your job would be *much* easier if all depressions could be cured by simply starting the crayon box from the other end of the queue.  In the future however, do you think you could at least ask *her* before you haul me in here?"

He managed to mutter something which I took for assent neither Lauren or myself has heard anything from him since.

ObPeeve:  School Psychologists that are looking for deeper meanings in simple kids' actions.

!Peeve:   He now scuttles around the nearest corner whenever he sees me coming.  I think the poor man probably suffers from deep-seated, repressed emotions.

---

Installing the “Copy as Plain Text” add-in in Firefox 3

I’ve installed Firefox 3 over Firefox 2 and it’s been a big improvement in performance and UI experience.  But it doesn’t work with all of the add-on extensions that are available for Firefox 2.  There are some nice extensions that were written for Firefox 2 that have not been updated for Firefox 3.  One that I use a lot is the “Copy Plain Text” add-in, written by Jeremy Gillick.  This extension provides a "Copy as Plain Text" option so that you can copy text from a page and have the formatting stripped out.

The problem is that Jeremy hasn't released a version that will run under Firefox 3.  When Firefox installs an add-on extension, it checks the version of the extension and prevents older extensions from being installed.  While this is a good thing in preventing extensions that broke with Firefox 3, it's an annoyance for the ones that work just fine.  I'm not sure what happened Jeremy Gillick, but appears that he has abandoned his simple, but cool extension.

While reading the comments left on the add-on page, I saw that a user named "ervee" (eRVee Moskovic , and that is how he capitalizes it.) had patched "Copy Plain Text" so that it will install with Firefox 3.  It appears that he changed a single line in the install.js file that was bundled in the extension from the line that contained

const gVersion = "0.3.3";
to
const gVersion = "0.3.3b";

And that single letter "b" is all that was needed to allow Firefox 3 to install this extension.

Ervee posted his modified extension as http://ervee.moskovic.org/copy_plain_text/copy_plain_text-0.3.3b-fx+mz+tb.xpi

If you download his modified version of the extension, you have to tell Firefox 3 how to install it.  Save the extension to a local folder, then open the fire from within Firefox 3 by selecting "Open File" from the "File" menu.  You will then be prompted with the Software Installation dialog. Click install and then restart Firefox when prompted.

An alternative method (documented here) would be to open the "Add-ons" dialog by selecting "Add-ons" from the "Tools" menu.  Once that dialog has opened, minimize the main form and drag the extension file to the dialog. You will then be prompted with the Software Installation dialog. Click install and then restart Firefox when prompted.

Either way should work, I did the former and the extension is working just fine with Firefox 3.  Thanks "ervee"!