Friday, February 06, 2009

An oddity in Windows Live Writer

As mentioned in the previous post (about OpenNTF.Org), I now use the Writer available under Windows Live to create and update posts to my blogs.

I decided to check out the Writer web site for updates, and installed the latest version (build 14.0.8050.1202) which has even more nice features. The upgrade all went fine.

That done, I started researching a problem that has cropped up a few days ago, with Windows inscrutably refusing to go into Standby mode.

It’s very irritating. Now, instead of quickly powering down into standby the system nearly always hangs displaying the “Windows is now shutting down” panel. My only option then is to do a hardware reset in order to get going again.

Some software that I installed or patched in the last week or so is probably the culprit. After a little research, I  decided to uninstall certain products that I suspected might be the cause of the hangs. (Windows power configuration issues like this can be frustratingly difficult to sort out.)

So I opened the Control Panel, and got the following result (only the top few lines are shown). Notice the oddity, near the top?

 Windows_live_writer_oddity 
  (Click to show a larger image)

I’ve never seen the likes of it before, in any version starting with Windows 95.

An examination of the Windows registry (by searching for “LiveWriter”) detected the minor but amusing gaffe made by somebody at Microsoft:

Windows_live_writer_oddity_registry_ProductName_entry
(A quite unusual registry key value)

HTML rules, it has now infested even the registry! … And I thought it was only me who did silly things like this.


2 comments:

  1. I think you'll find that the registry entry you're referring to above is actually a LiveWriter add-in to allow you to insert "hr" tags into your posts.

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  2. Yeah -- now that I think of it that way, you're probably right, Richard.

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