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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 Vista experiences to-date have been nothing short of fantastic. However, I did experience a very annoying problem where my Thinkpad T60 would awake from sleep... but only half way. The screen would never come on.

Very annoying as the problem seem random and I could not reproduce it. Well, I was able to track it down to 2 things.

1) I was not using the OEM version of the ATI driver.

In the past I have not ever installed the OEM Video Driver as it was always "behind" the latest ATI or nVidia one. Well as it turns out, there are occasions where the OEM version has custom bug fixes. Installing the Lenovo ATI driver resolved part of the problem.

I still experienced the problem, albeit much less frequently. But when I did I went berserk. There is nothing worse then seeing all these blinky lights saying your pc is awake as well as all the sounds and stuff working. Well I did some research and stumbled upon this KB Article.

2) I installed a hotfix for bluetooth.

What does bluetooth have to do with standby?

SYMPTOMS

When you wake a Windows Vista-based computer from sleep, a Bluetooth device may no longer work correctly. After this problem occurs, the computer may stop responding when you try to put the computer to sleep again. Or, the computer may stop responding when you try to shut down or restart the computer.

CAUSE

This problem may occur on a system that supports selective suspend if the computer goes to sleep shortly after the Bluetooth device's power is cycled.

Sounds familiar... I installed the hotfix and have been running smooth for 2 weeks now. Getting this hotfix is annoying, you have to email support to get it.

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.

update: Microsoft has released an add-in to restore this functionality in Excell 2007

As a Program Manager at Microsoft I spend days and days using Sharepoint Lists. It's often very easy and preferable to export a list to Excel and manipulate it there. For example, you can read/write changes in a list and then also crunch data on other sheets like making Pivot Tables and so on.

Well imagine my horror when I learned that the two way sync feature was removed from Excel 2007. A little part of me dies every time I export to excel and then have to manually go and update a sharepoint list. I don't want to use Access to manipulate lists offline, but it appears that's the only option.

Well, I did some searches today and low and behold there is a solution. If you look in the comments in the post I just referenced you will find this:

Hi,

You can have that 2-ways sync functionality back if you install the small free activeX (200K, no dependency whatsoever on anything) available here: http://www.softfluent.com/wsslists.htm.

It reroutes .IQY files associations to itself, so when you click on WSS's "export to spreadsheet" links, it launches Excel 2007, and creates a 2 way sync WSS list (sorry, "table" as the feature has been renamed in the newly created workbook/sheet.

Any questions can be sent to smo (at) softfluent (dot) com.

Simon.

Thank you Softfluent for restoring my productivity.

To make this work on Vista you must launch IE as an administrator, then install the ActiveX Control. Then export your list to excel and when you right click on the table you will see the "Synchronize with SharePoint" button.

Funny how you think you know about ever hidden feature and shortcut. Well Sean tells us about Inline Autocomplete and what it does. I for one had no idea and am glad I found out .