For years, Gartner has been recommending VA/VM as the effective way to prevent successful attacks, only they’ve been a bit too low key about it in my opinion. Of course as a VA vendor I’m not even going to pretend to be objective here, but I always wondered if the fact most leading vendors are relatively small made Gartner pay less attention to the field.

Whatever the reason was, Gartner just came out with “Strategies for Dealing with the Increase in Advanced Targeted Threats“.
Here are some nice quotes; I especially liked the one about 0-days. I’m in complete agreement with all of them:

Quotes from this article (emphasize is mine):

“ Enterprises need to focus on reducing vulnerabilities “

” There are existing security technologies that can greatly reduce vulnerability to targeted attacks.”

” … the real issue [is] focusing on the vulnerabilities that the attackers are exploiting. “

” The reality is that the most important issues are the vulnerabilities and the techniques used to exploit them, not the country that appears to be the source of the attack”

” Own the vulnerability; don’t blame the threat: There are no unstoppable forces in cyber attacks” (this one should be printed on T-shirts).

“If IT leaders close the vulnerability, then they stop the curious teenager, the experimental hacker, the cybercriminal and the information warrior”

“Many attacks that include zero-day exploits often use well-known vulnerabilities as part of the overall attacks.”

Had an interesting experience.

There is a file I keep with some reference material.  For a number of years I’ve had this in the root directory of the drive on most of my machines.  I tried to update it the other day.

I couldn’t.

Windows 7 apparently would not let me modify anything in the top-level directory, even though properties showed that I had full control.  I tried a variety of different ways to make these permissions effective.  No dice.

Eventually I found myself somewhere that offered to let me blow off permissions for the root directory.  Permanently.

I thought it over, and eventually decided not to.  Generally, I’d agree that having the ability to write to the root directory might possibly be dangerous, in a somewhat bizarre set of circumstances.  But I decided that moving the file wasn’t that much of an issue.  So I let the permissions lie.

But I’m left with some questions.  My first reaction, once I got to the screen that would let me change the permissions, was to blow them away.  I was so frustrated by the roadblocks and lack of information provided by Windows 7 that I probably wasn’t thinking completely clearly.  And I’d suspect I’m not alone in this.

The other question is: why on earth did Windows 7 allow me to put the files there in the first place, but not allow me to modify them?  Isn’t the ability to put a file there in the first place even more of a security risk?

I’m not sure why I feel the urge to keep writing about comment spam: primarily, I suppose it’s because I get so much amusement from it (just as well considering how much of it I read when I moderate comments on the ESET blog), rather than because the world is full of bloggers waiting for me to tell them how to recognize it, even if it isn’t apparently posted by someone called nike soccer shoes or where to buy a laptop or even my personal favourite of the moment, rolling in the deep adele. (Well, there went my favourite heuristic.)

Still, I liked the cheek of this one:

“Throughout the great scheme of things you’ll get a B- for effort. Where you actually confused me personally was first on your particulars. As people say, the devil is in the details… And it couldn’t be more correct here. Having said that, let me inform you what did deliver the results. Your authoring is pretty powerful which is most likely the reason why I am taking the effort in order to comment. I do not make it a regular habit of doing that. 2nd, even though I can easily see a leaps in reason you make, I am not sure of just how you appear to connect the points which inturn produce the final result. For the moment I shall yield to your point but trust in the foreseeable future you actually link the facts better.”

So much so that I did a quick Google to see how common this particular approach is, and sure enough I found a whole bunch of very similar posts - by similar, I mean the same core text with minor changes such as “the great pattern of things”. Apparently, I’m not the only blogger who tends to assume that if a comment is enthusiastic, it’s probably spam.

Thank you for your constructive criticism, Mr feather extensions online: I like your style. But my absolute favourite at the moment is Fritz, who commented dispiritedly that he is “always a big fan of linking to bloggers that I love but don’t get a lot of link love from”: too bad URLs in comments are stripped automatically, or I might have allowed that one through just to put a smile on your face.

David Harley

At a local conference, one presenter had a topic of “Blow Your Own Horn.”  The point was to be ready with some kind of success story (any kind of success story) ready for presentation.  Elevator pitch level stuff, except you aren’t selling anything specific, just success.

For example: “Last year you (the Board) approved purchase of a $50,000 licence fee for AV software on the email server.  This past month, records show it stopped 1 million viruses, which would otherwise have gotten through.  Had they been run, they would have cost $500 each (estimated industry average) to clean up.  Therefore, your prescient decision to spend $50,000 has returned $500,000,000 to the company.”

(OK, yes, any infosec professional knows the holes in that logic.  And you are turning it so that you are creditting the Board with what should be *your* success.  But you get the idea.)

I suggest everybody have a file in some readily accessible drawer, for scribbling down any idea you come up with along these lines, using company specific data.  One idea per page.  Any time you get called to the Boardroom (or, depending upon how many ideas you can come up with, any meeting) grab a sheet and read it in the elevator.  Whatever they asked you to talk about, walk in and start off with, “Thank you for your interest in X.  Before I begin, I’d like to let you know that, because of our investment in a $2,000 course in Ethereal, for one of the net sec admins, last April’s intrusion was detected within 5 hours, and we were able to ensure that all servers were hardened against that particular attack within only a further 12 hours, all within house.  Normally such an attack would be undetected for three days, and would have required outside help at a usual cost of $7,000.”

(Yes, this gets down into the weeds in regard to architecture, but security is a lot more about politics than technology.  And people love stories.)

A few interesting … “undocumented features” of Windows 7 observed in the last couple of days.

One is that Windows 7 seems to have a great deal of difficulty remembering the window settings (placement, size, full screen, etc.) for non-Microsoft software.  Not terribly important, perhaps, but greatly annoying, and new to Windows 7.  (XP had some faults in that regard, but nothing like Win7.)

I plugged in one of my cameras this morning.  Normally this would just be plug and play.  However, I couldn’t find any entry for it in Windows Explorer, even though the computer had said that the new device was found, and the driver successfully installed.  Unplugged and plugged again, and it still wouldn’t play.  Finally went looking for devices and printers, and, under removeable storage it simply did not appear.

However, I noticed that one of the other devices had an oddly familiar name.  When I clicked on that, I noticed that one of my mapped network drives was no longer that network drive, but the camera.  Very odd.

(I must say that, once I found out [via Google, not Microsoft Help] how to access it, I very much appreciated the fact that you no longer have to go through contortions to get yourself a command prompt function via Windows Explorer.  A “Shift-context menu” seems a bit arcane, though …)

Having gotten some of the software and XP Mode problems out of the way, I now need to install some of the old (and some new) hardware to the new desktop.

The HP LaserJet P1005 installed just fine as soon as it was plugged in.

I suspected that the Epson Stylus CX6400 wasn’t going to be quite so simple, since I recalled having to run the install software before I connected it the last time.  And, yes, sure enough, the installation software (once I found the old CD and instructions) didn’t run under Windows 7.

So, off to Epson.  I checked under Drivers and Support, specified my “All-in-One” (it’s get a printer, a scanner, and some memory card readers), and asked for Windows 64-bit drivers.

Now out of Epson EasyPrint v3.10, ICM Color Profile Module Update v1.20, TWAIN Driver and EPSON Scan Utility v3.04A, TWAIN Driver and EPSON Scan Utility v2.68A, and Printer Driver v5.5aAs which would you pick?  Yeah, I didn’t know either, and the descriptions weren’t an awful lot of help.  But I knew (from the dim and distant past) that TWAIN (we used to say that it stood for “Technology Without An Interesting Name) had something to do with scanners, and the v2.68A was listed for 64-bit only, so I chose that.

It ran.  After a while I got the scanner part of the Windows Fax and Scan program.  It didn’t have many options.  Epson Scan had been installed, but it insisted that it couldn’t run, and Epson Scan Settings insisted the scanner wasn’t installed.  I used the troubleshooter (seemingly provided by Epson) but it was no help.  I rebooted the computer: that was no help.  I tried help and searching on the Epson site: you guessed it, no help.

I did some Google searching.  Found a mention of device drivers, and having to uninstall the Microsoft brand, and install the proper Epson driver.

Well, thought I, I installed this with installation and setup stuff from Epson: surely Microsoft wouldn’t have messed it up in that short time.  But I had a look at Device Manager anyway.

And, lo and behold, the driver that was installed was signed by Microsoft.  Uninstalled that, searched the disk for related drivers, found two.  One was for CX6300/CX6400, and one just for the CX6400, so I installed the latter, on the theory that the more specific was more likely to be from Epson.

And now Epson Scan is happy to run.

(I also installed the original XP software from the CD within XP Mode.  That didn’t work …)

I think I may finally be getting the hang of this XP Mode thing.  (I may also be fooling myself …)

As previously noted, XP Mode doesn’t access the “real” drive, but a virtual drive which is contained in one large file.  (Actually, seemingly a minimum of three, but only one appears to contain the drive “contents.”)  XP Mode does provide you with links to the real drives on the computer, but, while accessible from most Windows programs, since they are not mapped to drive letters, you cannot do anything with DOS programs, even though such programs run under XP Mode.

I figured I would have to create the directories, with files I wanted to work on, within the “virtual” drive, and, each time I made any modifications, remember to copy the new versions back to the “real” disk so they could be used under Win7.  Not only is this a nuisance, but it wastes disk space.  XP Mode takes up enough space as it is: starting at about 1.5 gig, by the time you get it up to speed with Windows updates, it has ballooned to 6 or 7 gig.  Any programs or file space you want come on top of that.  (And, since I no longer trust XP Mode to stay stable, I have been making backup copies as I have been doing the updating and adjusting of the virtual machine, wasting even more disk space.)  An annoyance, to say the least.

I can’t remember where I found it, but somehow I noted a reference to the actual description, within XP Mode, of the links to the real drives.  It looks just like a network reference to a shared resource.  So I tried mapping that format and creating a DOS “lettered” drive mapping (from within XP Mode).  So far it seems to work fine.

For those who’d like to try, the “network” name of the real computer seems to be TSCLIENT.  So, in order to create a link to the C: drive on the real computer, map to \\TSCLIENT\C .  (It does not seem to matter what your real machine’s name is, that name does not seem to be used in the reference.)

Well behaved anitvirus programs can safely work together in peace and harmony.

Unfortunately, relatively few AVs are well behaved.

On my new desktop, I’ve got Avast (came with the machine, has a free version, and is a pretty good product) and MSE (it’s free, and it’s pretty safe for most users, although, as a professional, some parts of it irk me).  I’ve set both to ignore the virus zoo, although they aren’t too good at taking that restriction to heart.

MSE quarantined a few samples before I got things tuned.  Of course, it doesn’t have any function to get stuff out of “quarantine.”  (As I say, as a professional this is irksome, but, considering the average user, I’d say this is a darn good thing.)

Today Avast gave me a warning of some dangerous files.  They were the ones MSE quarantined.

(In case anyone is interested, the quarantine seems to be in \ProgramData\Microsoft\Microsoft Antimalware\LocalCopy.)

There are some … interesting aspects to running XP Mode.

If you are running XP Mode in a window within Windows 7, the “Windows” key on the keyboard brings up the Start menu on Windows 7, rather than XP Mode, even if XP Mode is the active window.  I suppose that is reasonable, since the Windows key seems to override pretty much anything else that is happening at the time, although it’s annoying that you can’t use the keyboard shortcuts for things like opening Windows Explorer and issuing the “Run” command.

What seems a little odder is that the F1 key seems to be sent to both Windows 7 and XP Mode if XP Mode is the active window.  Whatever action you wanted with F1 within XP Mode (and the active program there) takes place, but you also get the Help box for XP Mode itself (which can also be annoying.)

The Shift-Tab for switching between windows also immediately shifts you out of XP Mode and into the next Windows 7 window.  Understandable, I suppose, but arrgghh!)

You can, of course, avoid these difficulties by switching into Full Screen mode.  Unfortunately, Windows Virtual Machine seems to have some problems there: it seems to momentarily lose all the “integration” functions, and has to re-enable them.  This seems to result in strange effects, such as the loss of access to shared drives (so, if you were pointed at a specific directory, when you switch you are no longer “there”).

Well, further observations on XP Mode.

It may be necessary, but it’s touchy as all get out.  Also, so far I have not found anything that seems to be willing to do a restore.  There is a function called “Undo Disks,” but that possibly makes the system less stable when it is enabled.  More on that later.

After the crash on Gloria’s account, I found where the files were, particularly the disk file.  Since I had my account working, and since I had already applied all the Windows Updates to it, I copied my disk file to her directory.

It fired up just fine,and I made the necessary changes, setting it to her preferences and installing and testing some programs she wanted.  I tested the program setup, and everything seemed to be fine.  So I shut the program down.

It came up again demanding a username and password.  No matter what I tried, nothing worked.

So, I tried copying my disk file over top of hers again.

(Let me say, at this point, that all this is taking much longer than would be evident.  The disk files are enormous, multiple gigabyte files.  Just copying them takes about a quarter of an hour at times.  Also, each time you shut down, and start up, the virtual machine, it takes at least five minutes just to start.)

I got the same kind of crash as before, a missing file.  Different file, but same result.  No possible way to get it to start.  By this time I had found the setting that allows me, when closing the system, to shut it down, rather than just hibernating it.  (If you allow it to hibernate, it is, as far as Windows is concerned, still running, and therefore cannot be messed with.  Or fixed.)

By this time I had found the original, plain jane, basic, vanilla XP Mode virtual disk file.  It is stored elsewhere on the computer.  So I tried getting rid of some of the (obviously corrupted) working files, and tried to start from scratch.

Somehow this has created two virtual XP Mode “machines.”  Well, if one of them will keep working, it may be worth the wasted disk space.

Ah, yes.  I promised more on “Undo Disks.”  Given the name, you would think that this would allow for a sort of restore point type situation.  Well, it does, but it does it in a fairly kludgy manner.  If you enable Undo, the virtual machine, when you make a change to the disk (write a file, modify settings, whatever), the change isn’t actually made on the virtual disk.  It’s held in a separate file.  You can see that this might create problems, since the system has to read the basic virtual disk file, and then has to read the diff file, as it were, and apply the changes as a kind of journalling.

In the first account I composed for you, Computophilus, I talked of the vital need to get a version of Win7 that has XP Mode, and how I got it, and have it.

Or, rather, I had XP Mode.  I still have it, but Gloria doesn’t any more.

Given the time the update process takes, and the space it occupies on the disk, one would think that one set of system files is all that is necessary, and updates would be applied to the other Windows 7 accounts.  Not so!  When I went to make some adjustments to XP Mode on Gloria’s account, it was still trying to sell me all those lovely updates.  So I installed them.  After which, of course, it wanted to restart.  So I did.

It didn’t.

The error messages I am getting (not all consistent) started out with a note that “Integration” wasn’t working.  So I “retried,” and, when that didn’t work (surprise, surprise) I tried “continue.”  I got something like a DOS box, noting (among other things) that “hal.dll” is missing or corrupt.

The Hardware Abstraction Layer file is necessary to Windows, of course.  Normally you try to restore a backup or something to the disk.  Unfortunately, in a virtual machine (or, a Windows Virtual PC, at least) the “disk” is a file on the real disk.  Not a folder, a file.  And therefore inaccessible.

Now, there is a utility that gives you information about the various components of your Windows Virtual PC.  The virtual hard disk (or disks) is one item.  There is an option to modify it.  However, you can only modify the disk if the virtual machine it is assigned to is shut down.

And, since the Windows Virtual PC XP Mode machine isn’t working properly, the shutdown isn’t working, either.  Therefore, the machine can’t be fixed.

(Yes, I’ve tried the “restore previous version” option under Windows Virtual PC: apparently Microsoft doesn’t think that a restore point is necessary when installing Windows updates.)

(Any suggestions on the XP Mode problem gratefully accepted, although I’m now off to search and see if I can’t find a fix.)

Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse delendam.

In researching the purchase of the new desktop, I found/was told/noted that you needed Windows 7 Pro version for “XP compatibility.”  Naturally, I assumed that this would be built into the product that I bought.  (Actually, I was a bit worried by that statement, since one would assume that a new version of an operating system would still run stuff that the old one did.  I still use programs that I first ran on MS-DOS 2, and they were still working fine on XP.)

Not so.

Well, I’m sure that Microsoft would take issue with that statement.  After all, when you try to use the “recommended settings” when troubleshooting compatibility, it tells you that it is running “Windows XP (Service Pack 2)” compatibility mode.  (Pretty much regardless of what the program or utility is.)  And if, trying the more manual troubleshooting, you tell the troubleshooting program that it did run under previous versions of Windows, there are XP SP2 and XP SP3 options (among nine others) to choose from.

It doesn’t matter which you choose.  I haven’t found any of them to work with any program to date.

However, the advice to buy Win7 Pro is sound, if you want to have much of a chance of running anything (interesting) that you have been using up until now.  You absolutely must have XP Mode.  It solves all your problems.  (Well, it solves a bunch of problems, and you can probably fix the rest with some scripting, which is annoying, but better than nothing.)  You have XP Mode if you buy Win7 Pro.

Well, no you don’t.

XP Mode turns out to be part of Windows Virtual PC.  You don’t have it with the base install.  You have the right to have it, but you don’t have it, and you have to download it and install it.  In trying to find out why I couldn’t run stuff that had run perfectly well under XP, I found a mention in the Help system, which made me realize this was a possiblity.  Sure enough, chasing this mention down through a few related help articles, I found a link to go and get it.  So I did.

Well, I tried.  In order to install Windows Virtual PC, Microsoft wants to run MGA.  MGA stands for Microsoft’s Grasping Authenticator.  Microsoft disputes this, and refers to it as Microsoft Genuine Advantage, but there is absolutely no advantage to you, the user, in MGA.  There definitely is an advantage to Microsoft, because, if you need MGA to run or install something, and anything at all goes wrong, you have to pay Microsoft to get it fixed.  Even if you’ve paid already.  I had no fear of MGA, because a) I knew that it was a genuine product, and b) I’d already had to run MGA to get the updates to work, and it hadn’t blinked.  This time, however, it would not believe that my Win7 Pro was Win7 Pro, and would I please cough up an extra $200.

(I took it back to the store I bought it from.  They got it fixed, for no money, but it did take them two days to do it.  And all my passwords were gone.  Oh, you thought passwords were there to keep people out of your computer?  Silly you.)

So now I have Windows Virtual PC, and XP Mode with it.  And, absent the fact that it creates a virtual disk for itself, and that, if you want to work on anything on your real disk you probably have to copy it on to this virtual disk, and mess around with settings, it runs everything just fine.  Per my previous posting on compatibility, Netscape/Communicator 4.8 works.  Eudora 1.5.2 works.  My beloved WordPerfect 4.2 (yes, that old) works.  So does WordPerfect 5.1, which is what Gloria prefers.  (I’m not sure I’m going to go to all the trouble of setting up the system that allows us to print from WordPerfect to a winprinter: we really only need to get at the files for reference purposes.)  Good stuff.

I did have to do a whole bunch of Windows Updates on XP Mode itself, which seems very strange to me.  Seeing as how I was downloading it from Microsoft, couldn’t they keep it patched and up to date?  Three or four sessions with Windows Update, and something close to a hundred updates by the time it seemed to settle down.

Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse delendam.

Plenty of frustrations in getting set up with Windows 7.

One of the first things I tried to do was add some utilities into the “SendTo” folder so that they are at hand when I am working in Windows Explorer.  These used to be stored in “Documents and Settings” so that’s where I started.  It still exists.

I couldn’t get access to it.  Couldn’t even open the list of subdirectories.  Even though I am running as admin (yeah, yeah, let me get the dratted thing running, first, and then I’ll worry about trying to restrict myself) access is denied.

So, if I’m an admin, I can change the permissions, yes?  Apparently not.  When I look at the Security tab, I apparently already have full control.  When I try and edit these permissions, just in case full control needs to be confirmed, I get a bunch of messages saying that I don’t have permission to change the permissions.  I’ve tried through a bunch of different screens having to do with security or permissions or rights, or editing any of the above, and so far not one of them has worked.

In any case, all of this is academic.  These settings no longer reside in “Documents and Settings” but in a new as of Vista) folder called “Users.”   “Documents and Settings” is merely a link.  (I think I had to change the permissions on the Users directory in order to get access and make the mods I wanted, but, to be quite honest, at this point I can’t remember everything I’ve had to do.)

OK, it’s reasonable that you shouldn’t be able, from a mere link, to change permissions on the actual directory.  (I think.  I’m having trouble thinking of anything you could actually do, but, on basic security principles, I’d have to agree that there is potential risk, at least.)  But, if so, then why have the link at all? As it is, it is completely useless, and only serves as a distractor for people like me who know some of the internals.

I’ve also got to say that the dialogue boxes for the “Security” and permissions are extremely odd.  You get to see what they are, but you don’t get to change anything, that is on a separate dialogue under edit.  And if you have selected a certain user or group, and then go to the editing dialogue, it is easy to miss the fact that the user or group chosen is no longer selected on that dialogue.  By default what is selected is “Everyone.”  If you are not paying attention, it would be really easy to grant full access to the entire world.

While doing the massive numbers of Windows Updates (it took about seven update sessions [including almost a gigabyte download for SP1], and four reboots, before the system seemed to settle down) I installed MSE.  I still like it for almost all users, and I’ve had some experiences cleaning up other machines where MSE worked well, and other AVs almost crashed the system.  However, as a professional, I’m still annoyed at some aspects of it.  I marked my “zoo” as excluded, but that setting does not, apparently, apply to the “Full scan,” nor to the real-time scanning.  (And, apparently, simply pulling up a directory in Windows Explorer counts as “opening” all the listed files.

Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse delendam.

I seem to have avoided the problems with Lion, by virtue of not having gotten around to buying it for a while.  Procrastination has its uses.

The battery problems (not those that Charlie Miller found, which seem to have been rather overblown by the media) appear to be getting worse: the battery is still taking forever to charge, and the charge doesn’t last as long. The power management “decisions,” on the part of the computer, are inconsistent.  Often, even when the computer is actually plugged into the mains, the mouse will be shut down, presumably to save power.  On the other hand, sometimes when the computer goes (or is put) to sleep, the USB power is obviously still running, and the mouse sitting there glowing like a nightlight.

Something is not right between Apple and Twitter.  Looking at Twitter via the Web interface (using Safari) is fine–as long as you are only looking at a few screenfuls of postings.  if you go back several hours, and are dealing with a Web page with hundreds of postings, the Mac becomes almost unusable.  The same size of page viewed with an old netbook running XP and Firefox is slow, but definitely works.

It took me about a month or so to create my first hard, no-you-can’t-recover-with-Ctrl-Alt-Del, pull-the-plug-and-hope-the-filesystem-isn’t-trashed crash on Win NT.  It took longer than that for XP.

Three days after installing, taking a break and watching an amusing little video, Win7 crashed.  Black screen.  Well, it does a black screen rather a lot, really, and it’s getting a bit nerve wracking, but usually it starts showing stuff within a few seconds.  Not this time.  This time I got a full, right back to the boot sequence event, with some very worrying questions along the way.  Although it did seem to recover OK.
Since I’m going to be complaining about Win7 rather a lot (going on my initial experiences) I suppose I should note some things that I do like.

The main reason that Gloria has her own account and “Desktop,” rather than both of us just using the same one, is that I’m right handed, and she’s left handed.  So her account has the mouse buttons switched.  (And I always buy symmetric mice.)  An ongoing annoyance on XP is that, once it’s been on Gloria’s account, the mouse is left-handed until signed on to a right-handed account.  And vice-versa.  So it’s nice to know that, in Win7, someone at Microsoft has finally realized that, when you are switching users, there is need for context menus, and therefore both buttons can be active.  (It is annoying that they’ve added an extra screen you have to click through when switching …)

Also, it’s very cute that when a program is doing something that requires a progress bar, the toolbar button matches the “progress” with a green shading of its own.

Windows 7 is not compatible with anything before Vista.  (I refused to have Vista in the house, so I have no idea about whether Win7 and Vista are compatible.)  If your artsy friends are bugging you to get a Mac, or your geek friends are bugging you to get Linux, and you have been limping along with Windows XP, and are now desperately in need of a new computer (all of which applied to me), then go along with whichever set of friends will give you the most help, and switch.  It’ll be easier than trying to figure out how to make Windows 7 work the way you’ve been used to.

That’s an overstatement, of course, but not much of a one.

First off, you’ll have to throw out all your previous software.  I tend to stick with computers for too long, and with software for too long.  At least, that would be the position of software vendors.  I figure a) if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, and b) why should I have to spend a lot of time learning the mixed up new interface that some idiot down in marketing thought would be kewl, and try to find the functions that I need down where they have buried them.  (Often I find that the stuff I really need is completely gone.)

Think I’m kidding?

I use Firefox.  No particular problem there.  Except that Mozilla wanted me to install 5.0.1, after I’ve been used to 3.6.18 for a while.  And I only then realized that I had no idea how to move the bookmarks over to my new system.  I have no idea where Firefox puts them.  Now, under the previous versions of Firefox, it was pretty good about using any sets of settings you might have lying around, including old bookmarks files.  Now it’s gotten fussy.  Of course, now Firefox has a new Sync feature.  That’ll probably help in future, but it’s not much use right now. (Yes, I’m reading up on how to use it in the old version, and, yes, I’ll probably be able to get everything across.  Eventually.)  (And, besides, all of this is Mozilla’s fault, and I know you are eager for me to get on with the Microsoft bashing.)

So, Firefox works (wonder of wonders).  I use a mail program called Pegasus, which, with a little care and attention on installation, also works.

I also use Netscape 4.8.  (Actually Communicator 4.8, but …)  Yes, I know, old tech.  But, it is a very safe browser, especially with JavaScript turned off, and, as a malware researcher, I have occasion to look at some pretty dangerous places.  Also, it uses the old bookmark.htm file, which is really handy for managing and transfering my collection of bookmarks.  The installer will not run in Win7.

(Yes, I researched the problem, and, yes, somebody mentioned SeaMonkey.  Interface is very similar, I grant you, but I can’t find out where they keep the bookmarks.)

(Also, Windows 7 initially choked big time trying to run the installation.)

My wife likes the simplicity (and I like the safety) of Eudora.  Version 1.5.2.  Doesn’t run.

For both programs I have tried the “Troubleshoot compatibility” option.  I bought, and paid extra for, Windows 7 Pro specifically because it was “compatible” with WinXP.  I tried the “recommended” settings, which supposedly ran in-or-as WinXPSP2.  I tried the manual troubleshooting, telling it that the programs ran just fine under Win95/98/NT/2K/XP and/or 2003.  They didn’t run under any compatibility mode.

And, of course, don’t even bother to try and run any DOS or other command-line utilities.  (Even using “Run as administrator.”)

(Using utilities that mess with internals is one area where you don’t expect compatibility.  So I was surprised, and very pleased, to note that the Frhed hex editor works just fine under Win7, particularly after all the other problems I had.)

Some of these problems can be overcome, or worked around, using Windows Virtual PC XP Mode.  More on the trials of that, later

Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse delendam.