Microsoft Access missing menu bars

I had a problem where all my menu bars disappeared in access. I didn’t have any place to click so that I could customize the menu. In order to reset the interface back to default I did the following:

 

NOTE: Edit the registry at your own risk. I am not responsible if you break your machine by applying these modifications correctly, or incorrectly.

 

1)      Set a restore point if your running XP or Vista. This gives you a safe point in case you bork your registry.

2)      Open regedit.

3)      Navigate to HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Office/<version your using>/settings

4)      Export the key for backup purposes.

5)      Delete the “Command Bars” sub-key.

6)      Open Microsoft Access and your toolbars should be there.

 

 

 

 

Slow Nortel Contivity VPN downloads

We have some employees that access remote networks using Nortel Contivity VPN client. During the course of their duties they download large files and have issues with painfully slow (1-2 kb/s) download speeds in the application they are using. After much head banging and support technician stumping we finally found the cause.

Our firewall is a cisco based product and for some reason the Nortel Contivity VPN client did not like using the dynamic NAT address pool we had set aside for use by outbound connections. To resolve the issue we had to configure each computer that used the Nortel Contivity VPN client with a static NAT entry in the firewall. That caused their download speeds to jump from 2 kb/s to over 150 kb/s.

Just as a note, there were no errors reported in the firewall logs and no errors found by the Cisco engineers in the packet traces. Everything appeared to be fine. They are doing a little research to see if they can tell me why this was happening.

I'll let you know what I find out.

Blank data when filling datagridview from dataset

If your working with disconnected datasets that get bound to DataGridViews at runtime and you don't use the designer to preset the columns you may find yourself with empty rows or duplicate columns.

To fix the duplicate columns issue:

Add the following line to your code where you setup your datagridview(Example using DataGridView called dgrid).

this.dgrid.AutoGenerateColumns = false;

To fix the issue where you have blank rows and you know your dataset has the data:

Add the following line to your code where you set the properties of each column (Example using a DataGridViewColumn called dcol).

dcol.DataPropertyName = "name of column in datatable"

Blocking Drag-and-Drop on Network File Server

We've been wrestling with users who regularly drag one project folder into another on accident and don't even realize it. After scouring the internet I had a forhead smacking moment when someone pointed out that all you need to do is deny Delete writes for the folder in order to prevent it from being moved. It should work, I'll try it and confirm the results here.