Case of the CHM files which give you “Navigation to the webpage was canceled”

Opening CHM (Windows Help Files) downloaded from the internet or from a network location will most likely give you “Navigation to the webpage was canceled” and it will refuse to display the contents of the help file. This is due to changes that were introduced some years ago by a security update, and this is the default behavior in Windows Vista and 7 (and their Windows server equivalents).

I experienced this case at a customer site and to resolve the problem you can follow the steps in MS KB article KB896054. However adding the trusted UNC path caused some problems in this case, as the UNC path was sort of hidden because the CHM file was opened from an embedded link within an application.

So to find the UNC path from where the CHM file was opened I had two choices, either to use the famous Sysinternals tool Process Monitor to trace the open file action, but I chose a quicker way. Opened CHM files are logged in a file called hh.dat which can be found at C:\users\\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\HTML Help. This file, when opened with WordPad contains the path to the opened CHM file, which lead me to the key which was an important part of this solution.

Clearing the confusion on CopyProfile making default user profiles

Nowadays the only supported method of making changing to a user profile is to use an answer file to set the value CopyProfile to TRUE. The problem is that a lot of the documentation found is somewhat unclear on how to use this answer file. Fortunately Microsoft clears the confusion on this and I think this is worth mentioning to everybody as it has been causing a lot of confusion. They list scenarios for both MDT 2010 and ConfigMgr.

Beware of saved credentials

Saved credentials can be a good thing, but many times they are not. The last couple of weeks I have become involved in a couple of cases where saved credentials in all from Windows XP to Windows 7 have been the cause of strange problems, primarily accessing file servers.

The problems have been with accessing mapped network drives or browsing file servers, with various error messages. Even though Windows 7 sports the “new” credential manager, this feature has been there even in Windows XP. This means that you can add credentials for servers so that you won’t have to provide them when accessing resources on the network.

The cause of the problem is for instance when a user change his or her password and the saved credential become obsolete, causing the user to have serious problems authenticating to the network resources.

The settings for these saved credentials are as follows:

Windows XP: Start “User Accounts” control panel, choose an account and then go to “Manage my network passwords”.
Windows Vista: Start “User Accounts” control panel, choose an account and then go to “Manage your network passwords”.
Windows 7: Search for and start the “Credential Manager” control panel.”

Solve the problems accessing network resources by deleting the saved credentials once and for all!