People are starting to find that their Outlook has suddenly changed itself to the “new Outlook” which won’t work in many environments. To force it back to normal:
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Options\General
Add new or modify DWORD HideNewOutlookToggle = 1
HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Preferences
UseNewOutlook = 0
When staying at a public place, such as a hotel, a client’s laptop could connect to the Wi-Fi but was unable to perform anything over the Internet. For example, trying to browse anywhere would provide an error message like this:
This site can’t be reached www.msftconnecttest.com took too long to respond.
Windows sometimes performs an action called “Active Probing” to check if a path to the Internet exists before it even tries to send traffic over it. This “probing” involves sending an HTTP request to www.msftconnecttest.com and seeing if it returns a proper response. If it doesn’t, this error is displayed and Internet traffic is blocked.
Public WiFi often uses a captive portal that displays a page for people to authenticate themselves in some way, like a hotel room number, before its DNS will resolve anything. Thus, www.msftconnecttest.com will provide no IP address, even for the captive portal page.
We can disable the “Active Probing” here:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\NlaSvc\Parameters\Internet
Change the value for EnableActiveProbing from 1 to 0 to disable it and it should start working immediately.
In some instances, the above wasn’t enough. We performed these additional steps to resolve it:
After this, browsing to an IP address such as 142.250.75.238 brought up the captive portal’s sign-on page.
As a “security enhancement,” a computer running Windows 11 24H2 will not be able to access an SMB share that has been configured to not require a password (i.e., guest or public folder with password not required.)
Here’s how to disable the feature:
Using GPEDIT.MSC:
USING REGEDIT:
Windows 11 24H2 contains a new feature called “Recall.” This takes and stores continuous screenshots of all of your computer activity purportedly to “help you,” but it is a horrible security risk and should be disabled. Perform these procedures in an elevated command prompt window:
To check the feature’s current status:
Dism /Online /Get-Featureinfo /Featurename:Recall
To disable the feature:
Dism /Online /Disable-Feature /Featurename:Recall
If you want to enable it for some reason:
Dism /Online /Enable-Feature /Featurename:Recall
When setting up a new Windows 11 computer, you are forced to set up a Microsoft account. The option to set up a local account is no longer available unless you perform the following:
When you start up a new Windows 11 computer for the first time, a “wizard” begins. At the first screen, where you select the country, perform the following:
The computer will reboot and the option “I don’t have Internet” will become available for you to select and you can proceed to set up a local account.
UPDATE: Starting with Windows 11 25H2, the OOBE\BYPASSNRO has been removed, so the following method will accomplish the same thing:
When you start up a new Windows 11 computer for the first time, a “wizard” begins. At the first screen, where you select the country, perform the following:
The computer will then reveal the screen to set up a local account.
On a Windows 11 laptop, booting up stopped at:
Missing File: \BCD (instead of File: \boot\bcd)
Error code: 0xc0000098
We tried Startup Repair but it failed.
The laptop had secure boot enabled in CMOS & Bitlocker was on, so we needed to get the Recovery Key from the customer’s Microsoft account. We were prompted to enter this recovery key during this process. (Fortunately, they had used their MS account on the laptop!)
Now everything is back to normal.
This was a big help in our fixing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jjmfB20m9o
Computers with Acrobat or Acrobat Reader installed start having these errors appear on the screen.
Delete or rename the following keys:
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\AcroCEF.exe
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\RdrCEF.exe
There is a hidden advanced power setting “Unattended sleep timeout” that can cause this. To make the setting visible:
Change the Attributes value on the right to 2
Now you will see the “Unattended sleep timeout” setting which, in our case, was set to 2 minutes. We changed it to zero which disables it.
Usually, this problem is resolved by deleting credentials in the vault, running the MSRA tool, etc. But we had one where even trying to add the account into a new profile would never resolve the autodiscover. Also, clicking on the “Update License” option in any of the Office applications would produce “Something Went Wrong [1001]”
In one particular case, the problem was the machine was missing package information about either the Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL) or Live ID.
These two commandlets run in user-mode powershell resolved it:
Add-AppxPackage -Register "$env:windir\\SystemApps\\Microsoft.AAD.BrokerPlugin_cw5n1h2txyewy\\Appxmanifest.xml" -DisableDevelopmentMode -ForceApplicationShutdown
Add-AppxPackage -Register "$env:windir\\SystemApps\\Microsoft.Windows.CloudExperienceHost_cw5n1h2txyewy\\Appxmanifest.xml" -DisableDevelopmentMode -ForceApplicationShutdown
If that doesn’t help, try these:
if (-not (Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.AAD.BrokerPlugin)) { Add-AppxPackage -Register "$env:windir\SystemApps\Microsoft.AAD.BrokerPlugin_cw5n1h2txyewy\Appxmanifest.xml" -DisableDevelopmentMode -ForceApplicationShutdown } Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.AAD.BrokerPlugin
if (-not (Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.Windows.CloudExperienceHost)) { Add-AppxPackage -Register "$env:windir\SystemApps\Microsoft.Windows.CloudExperienceHost_cw5n1h2txyewy\Appxmanifest.xml" -DisableDevelopmentMode -ForceApplicationShutdown } Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.Windows.CloudExperienceHost
In another case, the ADAL was already installed so this was necessary to fix it: