Identify Mystery Apps Running in the Shadows

Lincoln Spector

I close every window and every icon in the system tray, then press Ctrl-Alt-Delete, but I still see that programs are running in the background. What are they?

Chris Madaio, Baltimore

They could be anything; many programs have modules that lurk in your PC's shadows. To find out what a particular unidentified program is, press Ctrl-Alt-Delete to open the Close Program dialog box, then write the program's name down on paper. After you've closed the box, select Start, Find, Files or Folders. In the Named field, enter the name of the program followed by .exe, such as dbserver.exe. In the Look In field, select Local hard drives, then click Find Now.

Chances are you'll find the file. When you do, the folder it's in should tell you what program put it there. For instance, if the file's in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office, chances are it's part of Office.

If a file search doesn't turn up a program, or if it's in a common dumping-ground folder like C:\Windows\System, turn programs on and off. Select Start, Run, type msconfig, and press Enter. Click the Startup tab for a list of all programs that load at boot-up. Find out what's loading a particular program by unchecking options and rebooting until you can identify the malefactor.

Programs you're likely to find in the Close Program dialog box include:

Explorer and systray: Basic parts of Windows that should always be up.

Findfast and osa: Parts of Microsoft Office 97 (but not of Office 2000). If you don't want them, you can get rid of them by removing Microsoft Find Fast and Office Startup from the Start, Programs, Startup menu.

Rnaap: Part of Windows. It loads when you use dial-up networking, and then stays in memory until you close Windows.

Customize the Open Dialog Place Bar in Office 2000

On the left side of the Office 2000 File Open dialog box are icons for five locations where Microsoft assumes you want to keep your files. How can I customize these choices to add the folders that I want to have there?

Brad Williams Victoria, British Columbia

This is so typically shortsighted of Microsoft. It gives you a handy feature that absolutely requires customization to be useful, and then it doesn't tell you how you can customize it!

To change what Microsoft calls the Place Bar (see FIGURE 1), you have to edit the Registry. As usual, you should back up the Registry first (for instructions on doing this, see May's Answer Line ).

Note: Before you start editing the Registry, close all Office applications.

When you're ready, select Start, Run, type regedit, and press Enter to bring up the Registry Editor. Navigate in the left pane to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Common\Open Find\Places\StandardPlaces.

The dialog box allows you to display only five place icons, so for every one you want to add, you must hide one of Microsoft's defaults. (Later I'll show you how to outwit this requirement.) Beneath StandardPlaces you'll find a key for every icon on the Place Bar. Right-click on one for an icon you don't want, and select New, DWORD value. Name the value show, and leave it with its default value of 0. Repeat this procedure for every icon you want to hide.

Once you've hidden a few folder icons, you're ready to create new ones. Right-click the UserDefinedPlaces key under Places, and then select New, Key. Give the key any name you wish.

Right-click the new key and select New, String Value. Name this value name. Press Enter, type in an appropriate name, and press Enter again.

Right-click the key again and select New, String Value. Call this one path; for the text string, enter the full path to the folder. For instance, if you want a shortcut to your Alternate Docs folder on your D: drive (as in Figure 1), your name value might be Alternate Docs and your path value D:\Alternate Docs.

There's a way to get around the dialog box's five-folder limit. Right-click the Places key and select New, DWORD Value. Name the new value ItemSize and leave it with the default value of 0. The folder icons will be smaller, and you'll be able to fit more of them in the dialog box, as shown in the right-hand panel of Figure 1.

Share an Outlook Calendar

We want to share one Outlook 2000 calendar across a small-office LAN. We can't figure out how to do it. Can you help?

Matthew Brenengen, St. Paul

Outlook 2000 offers several ways to share calendar information. I'll describe two that are easy to set up.

Net Folders relies on e-mail, so if everyone on your LAN uses Outlook as their e-mail client, you can use Net Folders. First, select File, Share, Calendar (you may have to wait for the Share option to appear). If you are told that a feature must be installed, click Yes and insert your Office CD-ROM.

Once everything is installed, Outlook will bring up the Net Folder Wizard. On the wizard's second page, where you identify the people you want to share your calendar with, click the Permissions button to allow them to alter the calendar.

The next time you send e-mail, Outlook will mail invitations to everyone you listed. When recipients click the invitation's Accept button, a copy of your calendar is loaded onto their computer. To see that calendar, they select View, Folder List. To make the calendar more readily available, they can drag it from the folder list to the shortcut bar. E-mail exchanges are generated automatically to keep individual copies of the calendar in sync.

Internet Free/Busy won't show you someone's whole calendar, but it will let you see the times other people are available, which is useful for setting up a meeting. The function is designed to work over an Internet connection, but it will work on any network with shared folders if you make the paths to those folders a URL (more on this below).

The first step is to create a folder that everyone can access on a network server or workstation. If you put it on a workstation, that system's owner must give everyone full read/write rights to it. Don't use spaces in the folder name (URLs can't have spaces). To publish your own information, select Tools, Options, click the Calendar Options button and then the Free/Busy Options button.

In the resulting dialog box, check "Publish my free/busy information." Then, in the "Publish at this URL" field, enter the path to your as-yet-uncreated file in the shared folder. This path must be entered as a URL, starting with file:// and using forward slashes (/) instead of backslashes (\). For instance, if the Shared folder is called Freebusy and is on a computer identified as Shared on the network, and your name is Matthew, you might enter file://shared/freebusy/matthew.vfb. (The file extension must be.vfb.)

In the "Search at this URL" field, enter a URL to a generic file in the same path: file://shared/freebusy/username.vfb. Click OK three times to return to Outlook.

After you've set up your information, you'll have to send it manually. Select Tools, Send/Receive, wait for Free/Busy Information to appear on the menu, then select it. From now on, Outlook will update this information automatically.

To use other people's Internet Free/Busy, follow the steps above for sharing your own information, then go to Outlook's Contacts page and double-click the name of a coworker whose information you want to access (add any coworkers who aren't listed). In the resulting Contact dialog box, click the Details tab. At the bottom of the dialog box, in the Internet Free/Busy section, type the URL path to them, such as file://shared/freebusy/irving.vfb. Save and close the dialog box.

Outlook provides a number of ways to use this information. For instance, go to the date in the Calendar and select Actions, Plan a Meeting. Click the Invite Others button to select people to invite. After you select them and return to the Plan a Meeting dialog box, you'll see when each invitee is available (see FIGURE 2).

Snapping Desktop Icons

My desktop icons have lost their snap! They used to snap into position on the desktop. Now they stay where I put them. Is something broken?

A. Kilcup, Alexandria, Virginia

No, you just inadvertently changed the desktop's Auto Arrange setting. If you want the icons to snap into place and they don't, or if they're snapping and you'd rather they didn't, just right-click the desktop and select Arrange Icons, Auto Arrange (as shown in FIGURE 3).

Put Favorite Files on a Menu

Got files you open regularly? Want to make them easier to get to? Put them on the Start menu. In Windows Explorer, go to the appropriate folder and select the file. Drag it to the Start button, wait until the Start menu pops up, then place the file where you want it. (You're not moving the file, just creating a shortcut.) If you want all such files in one subfolder, right-click the Start button and select Explore to bring up the Start Menu folder in Windows Explorer. Then create a folder called, say, Favorite Files.

Send your questions to answer@pcworld.com. We pay $50 for published items. Contributing Editor Lincoln Spector writes the syndicated humor column Gigglebytes.