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Since using Vista at Microsoft I've been victim to more credential prompts in the past year than I have in my life. It really drives me nuts and I had no idea why.

There are two kinds of prompts I see:

1. credentials prompt from sharepoint when opening an office document (clicking a link to a word doc
2. credentials prompt in Outlook when connecting to Exchange

Now in a domain controlled environment you should never see prompts at all unless you don't have access to a resource. Windows takes care of this via Single Signon etc.

Well FINALLY I see David Rasmussen posted an explanation of issue #1, with a link to the SharePoint team blog explaining the issue. Sadly our IT department had no clue about this when I would call them.

The issue is that you must have "Automatically Detect Settings" enabled in your proxy configuration in IE. The problem is that in Hotmail we use some custom proxy servers to communicate with our labs and you need to disable "Automatically Detect Settings" to get to work. I can't tell you how many times I go to that dammed dialog to configure proxy settings. The crazy thing about this behavior is that if you just hit cancel on the credential dialog the document would still open:

With Office 2007 running on Windows Vista, opening an Office document hosted on a SharePoint (i.e. WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007) site results in a prompt for login credentials even if the user is already logged on with an account that has access to the document. Canceling the credential prompt may still (but not always) allow the document to open in read-only mode.

And of course if you wanted to edit the doc you were out of luck.

Issue #2 is related to some configuration issues in our DOMAIN environment that have been addressed, but nasty to track down. We all suffered a lot in the interim (entering credentials as many times as > 100 a day).

Another weirdo Vista problem solved. This is why I hate new Operating Systems. Too many regressions that are very hard to understand let alone get a fix.

My laptop is blue screening a few times a week now, and I have no idea why. I have been installing driver updates as they come to me from Lenovo and Microsoft, but this is just getting horrible.

Most recent issues are:

1. Laptop takes 5 minutes to go to standby
2. Laptop screen never turns on after standby
3. Laptop blue screens when waking from standby and docked
4. Laptop won't undock
5. Explorer is crashing left and right (due to Search Protocol Host crashing)

Problem caused by Windows Search Protocol Host

This problem was caused by Windows Search Protocol Host. Windows Search Protocol Host was created by Microsoft Corporation.

We are aware of this problem and working as quickly as possible to make a solution available to our customers. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.

Recommendation

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This problem might recur until the solution is released. Please continue to send error reports so Microsoft can study and try to correct the problem as quickly as possible. If you report the problem again and a solution is available, you will see an updated message and information about the solution to help you fix the problem.

Not sure what to do except reinstall Vista, which I don't really have time for.

Run, don't walk to get your Vista Updates.

I wrote about them last week. Talk about fast delivery .

I was excited to read about all the fixes in the upcoming Vista Performance and Reliability Pack and the Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack. However, part way into reading the list of fixes I started to get worried:

• Resolves an issue where creating AVI files on Vista may get corrupted.
• Resolves an issue where synchronization of offline files to a server can get corrupted.
• Improves the performance of Vista’s Memory Manager in specific customer scenarios and prevents some issues which may lead to memory corruption.

WTF? You mean the software I'm running can corrupt various files that I actively use via features in the OS?

Man, maybe next time I will wait for SP1. I'm especially concerned about the "synchronization of offline files to a server can get corrupted." since I use offline files to cache my Pictures on 2 different computers.

I'm also delighted for these specific items:

• Increased reliability and performance of Vista when entering sleep and resuming from sleep.
• Improved reliability when working with external displays on a laptop.
• Improves the performance when copying or moving entire directories containing large amounts of data or files.
• Improves the performance in calculating the ‘estimated time remaining’ when copying/moving large files.
• Improves performance in bringing up Login Screen after resuming from Hibernate.

These issues above cause me daily pain.

If you are using a ReadyBoost drive iTunes video is unplayable/unwatchable due to horrible perf.

I wonder who's at fault here?

I tried a few dozen things to get things working and then stumbled on a solution.... no ReadyBoost for me. Good thing I upgraded to 2GB of RAM on my Vista PC.