There’s a bumper sticker that I’ve often seen on pickup trucks which reads:
Yes, this is my truck
No, I won’t help you move
Well, I don’t own a pickup truck, but like most Known Computer Geeks, I do get asked to help people with their computers. Most of the time I’m glad to do it, especially if I can sit in front of the machine and look around for myself. Most of the time people are very grateful. A couple of friends bought me a nice bottle of scotch as a thank you for helping them. Did I say “couple of friends”? I meant “my new best friends.”
I don’t do crossword puzzles and I can’t rewire the house. I can usually solve computer mysteries, and I enjoy the challenge. Usually. Mostly in hindsight, after I’ve figured it out.
Hell is Other People’s Computers
A friend brought her laptop and said that Dropbox had stopped working. She also said that her 4 year old great-granddaughter had been playing on the computer around the same time. (They have since put a password on their main account and made a guest account for her.)
I assumed this would be a simple task: download and reinstall Dropbox. Whatever was missing would be replaced.
Except that it wouldn’t reinstall. Every attempt was met with this error message:
Error opening file for writing c:\users\sally\appdata\roaming\dropbox\bin\python25.dll [abort] [retry] [fail]
I was logged in as ’sally’ which was the only administrator account on the machine.
Things I tried:
right-clicking on the installer .exe and doing ‘run as administrator’.
turning User Account Control off.
deleting the folder.
I saw that the folder was marked “Read Only” and so I changed that.
Nothing worked.
Everything seemed to be telling me it was a permissions problem, but nothing was giving me the option to give it my OK to “do it anyway.”
I tried installing it after doing a “Safe Boot” but that didn’t seem to work either.
Finally, I decided to create another administrator account. I logged in and installed Dropbox again, and it worked…
…but during the installation process, a program called ThreatFire jumped up and said “Hey! This program looks dangerous! Do you want to install it?!” I said I did, and it finished installing.
When I realized I hadn’t seen that same warning in the other account, I became curious. I tried disabling it, but that didn’t help. Then I opened the program up and looked around. Sure enough, there in its “quarantine” was Dropbox.
I restored it (ignoring the message that I was running a “potentially malicious program”) and it works fine.
When I told Sally about it, she said “Oh, that’s right, there was something that came up, but I wasn’t sure what it said.”
(Here is the fundamental problem with these anti-virus/anti-spyware programs: they have to be overly aggressive to catch new threats, or else risk people getting infected even though they had installed the program. They also need to prove that they are doing something, so you won’t think that you wasted your money buying them. People who are worried about these things are going to become more worried because they are constantly bombarded with warnings that they are under potential attack. They are, most likely, going to do one of two things: either start accepted everything or start denying everything. If they start accepting everything, they’re more likely to eventually get hit by a piece of malware. If they start denying everything, they’re going to find things don’t work, and they aren’t going to know why.)
In just a very short time running Vista, I am amazed at how hyperactive Microsoft made it. Requiring user confirmation of every action may give them the ability to say “We’re secure! We asked if you wanted to do it!” but the annoyance level is so high that I would suspect many users have disabled the warnings altogether.
As usual, “create a new account and see if it works there” is a really handy diagnostic.