Software Engineer

Category: Windows

Show old title bar in Thunderbird

With the latest release of Thunderbird 17, the menu bar and tabs are drawn into the title bar. On Windows XP, this then looks like the following:

New title bar in Thunderbird

In the default theme, the active title bar is blue. Thunderbird adds more stuff to the title bar which increases the blue area. This is not acceptable but fortunately this can be configured. Go to Settings > Advanced > Config Editor (in the Advanced Configuration section).

Search for the setting mail.tabs.drawInTitlebar and change the value to false (e.g., by double-clicking on it). And voilà, much better:

Restored title bar in Thunderbird

 

Using multiple SVN clients with the svn+ssh protocol and a putty profile

When trying to access a SVN repository using the svn+ssh protocol with TortoiseSVN it might happen that the password prompt shows up endless times. One suggested solution is to set up a profile in putty and use a private key for authentication for ssh there. Then in TortoiseSVN the host name just has to be changed to the name of the profile, e.g. svn+ssh://username@puttyProfileName/path/to/repo.

This works well until trying to reuse the stored SVN information of your local working copy in another client, for example your IDE. In my case I am using Eclipse with the Subclipse plug-in and my first approach didn’t work with Subclipse, which meant I couldn’t do any team actions from Eclipse when the projects where checked out using TortoiseSVN. If you are only using either of them it works fine.

The solution is quite simple: Rename the putty profile to the actual hostname and use the regular URL for the repository. That’s it. If you’ve used the putty profile name before just use relocate in TortoiseSVN to change the repository URL. TortoiseSVN will then still use the putty profile with the private key to authenticate. Other clients like Subclipse see it as an actual hostname and are able to use that.

Office End-User License Agreement (EULA) has to be accepted every time

Do you have to accept the the End-User License Agreement (EULA) of your Office applications every time you start them even though you’ve accepted them already? This might be because you are using a restricted user account and thus the change can’t be written into the Windows registry.

To solve this log in with an Administrator account and perform the following steps for all Office applications you are using: Open the application, accept the EULA and close the application again.

If you log in with your user account again the EULA should not appear again. If it doesn’t work try to modify the permissions in the registry described in this knowledge base article.

Hide the “Network” icon from Windows 7 Explorer

If you want to hide the “Network” icon from the sidebar of the Windows Explorer in Windows 7 you can do this by modifying the registry. In order to be able to do this you have to be logged in as an Administrator. Despite that you’ll have to give yourself the permissions to change the value. You can remove the permissions after you are done again.

Please be aware that you should back up the registry before making any modifications. At least the key you will modify.

In the registry go to the following key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{F02C1A0D-BE21-4350-88B0-7367FC96EF3C}\ShellFolder\ and change the value of Attributes from b0040064 to b0940064. (Source)

Note: The network environment will still be accessible. It will not restrict access to it using other ways.

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