Viruses are back again!

Just when you thought XP Antivirus 2008 died out, enter AntiSpyware 2009. This piece of crap gets on your machine by screwing up internet explorer and the startup environment. The damn thing protects itself even in safe mode. I'm not sure how it does this; usually this is done with winlogon.exe, but the winlogon registry key seemed to be clean. We've just been reghosting the machine. Watch where you click! When you see a dialog box about spyware (and it's definitely not your antivirus software) restart your machine (this dialog box is from internet explorer).

Blackberry desktop manager

Working with the BDM has not been a general pleasure for me and other technicians where I work. It doesn't sync all the time, most likely due to corrupt organizer data and/or buggy software. The weird thing is that it was working kind alright when we had an Exchange server, but it got crappy when we migrated to a MAPI connector with Sun. I got it syncing by installing the exchange redirector BDM (we're still using outlook) and disabling redirection?! In the process of stumbling on this, I became familiar with just about every troubleshooting BB trick. Fun!