For possibly the first time in my life, I actually filed my taxes before April! I'm usually so last minute about filing, but decided I'd try to get a jump on it and get them done this weekend. So, I've officially filed my taxes. I'm just waiting on electronic confirmation.
I've been having a lot of weird performance issues lately. For some reason today my CPU was just getting maxed out within minutes of booting. My first thought was a virus or spyware, but after some digging around with the excellent application Process Explorer, I was able to find a thread in the system process that was eating all my CPU cycles. It was a DLL named "ssrtln.sys".
Troubleshooting this was a real pain. This DLL was eating so many CPU cycles, that it was actually preventing many applications from even loading (including Internet Explorer, the Control Panel and Windows Explorer.) Turns out this DLL belongs to the Sonic Solutions, which was part of the IBM DLA drivers which were loaded on my IBM ThinkPad R50p.
Since the driver is not loaded in Safe Mode, I tried booting to Safe Mode to remove the driver. Turns out, you can't uninstall this particular piece of software in Safe Mode.
Tonight I finally got sick of Windows XP's native support for Zip files in Windows Explorer. It really slows down Explorer and I really have never even liked the fact that it treats Zip files as folders. I want compressed archives to be what they are—files. If I want to view the contents of compressed archives, I'll use an archive applications like WinRAR.
To prevent Windows XP from treating compressed Zip files as a folder,
go to "Start > Run" and type the following:
regsvr32 /u zipfldr
If you wish to restore native Zip support in Windows, just go
back to "Start > Run" and type the following:
regsvr32 zipfldr