Life, the universe, and lunch

More Micro$oft related grief

Have you noticed that your PC doesn't show you image thumbnails or preview your pictures anymore? Apparently that's because Microsoft are idiots. So what else is new?

In late december they found a flaw in gdi32.dll that allowed specially constructed images to hijack your PC. Their first reaction was to release one of those fun security updates you get with 'Automatic Updates' turned on, that masks the problem by disabling the image and fax viewer that's built into XP. A few days later they fixed the bug in gdi32.dll and released another update, but it doesn't always turn the image viewer back on!

If you've been hit by this and have no other image viewing software on your PC, you'll find that double clicking an image or trying to view one from an e-mail just doesn't work. If that's the case, click your Start button and select Run..., then type in the command regsvr32 shimgvw.dll. That will restore the image viewer functionality on your machine.

I actually figured this out a few weeks ago (after losing a workday trying various system restore points and finally re-installing windows, all of which frustratingly failed to fix the problem!) but enough people at work who heard me ranting that day have come up to me in the past week to ask about it that I guess the problem is pretty widespread. So here for the benefit of my loyal fans is the posted solution. You're welcome. Leeches. ;-)

posted by ...K @ 4:14 PM