Ring, Ring

Remember the game "Telephone" from school? You'd all line up, the teacher would whisper a sentence into the first kid's ear, he'd turn to the next person and repeat it only once and then that child would do the same for the next kid, and so on and so on all the way down the line. The last kid to receive the message would yell out what rarely had anything to with the original sentence. What started as "Come to school at nine, go back home at three, dinner at six, books 'til eight, at ten you should be asleep" might be transformed into "ReallyEvilCanine eats his boogers in his sleep." That was just an example for illustration; I've gotten over it, stupid Marcy Katrayn and Debbie Wagner.

Telephone is funny when you're a kid (unless Debbie and Marcy were in your class). It sucks in the real world.

I should be happy our customers are all getting it through their heads that the MS 200606 security roll-up (a.k.a. 916281) breaks our app. I should be happy that most of them are reading the Notices and following the directions to get the 919010 compatibility patch. I should be thrilled that there probably won't be another horrid bloodbath when Microsoft's August security patch is rolled out. Some of the people are actually installing our patch so that it won't matter.

Others are handling things a bit differently:

Our support department has tried re-installing IE because of a ticket recommendation due to faulty/corrupt ActiveX components. However, the MS site has automatically downloaded and installed IE7. This is beta 3 version and we can't seem to remove the software.

--Jake

No shit you can't remove it. There are thousands of pages already written by people who made the mistake of installing IE7 onto a machine they actually needed to work on. It doesn't uninstall. It changes too many things and doesn't make correct back-ups.

But they're claiming IE7 was automatically downloaded? It's beta. You have to insist on downloading it from a separate area. It doesn't get bundled in anything, and certainly not in the Windows Update downloads (I just checked again).

I rang Jake on his cell phone.

It seems his company outsourced its internal IT department. These monkeys, having been told there was an ActiveX problem promptly stopped listening. They missed the bit that we have problems with ActiveX only when the 912812 or 200606 patch is applied. They never checked up on compatibility patches.

Because they're outsourced they never had the contact with the software developers who have access to our Knowledge Base. They never bothered asking anyone anything and decided what users needed was an upgrade to IE7 because that should fix everything. Never mind the fact that it's in beta because, as Microsoft is screaming everywhere they can, this is beta three. That must mean it's pretty damned good.

And so the idiots installed IE7 on a lot of machines. When told that they can't do that because it won't work with $OurBigApp, they claimed it was automatically forced on the machines by Microsoft. Maybe they figured they'd get away with that due to the noise about WGA (which anagrams to "Swine! We go in unadvantaged" and "Swine agenda: vow detain gnu").

With my response Jake can now go back and force the idiot outsourcing company to fix the mess. With any luck he'll be able to charge them for downtime. Jake wants IT back locally and if he gets a few more tickets like these there might be a chance. The IE7 stunt cost the company 150 downed workstations, including all administrator and developer machines, each of which will probably have to be re-imaged.

While writing everything up I thought of a method I haven't actually tried yet which *might* be able to restore the machine:

First uninstall IE7 as best as Windows will allow. Then go to Windows XP's System Restore (Accessories> System Tools > System Restore) and select a restore point from a few days before the IE7 installation. Once that finishes and the machine reboots, pop in the XP installation CD and run the repair function. This might restore the necessary IE6 files but I don't have time right now to test it. If you feel like giving it a shot, let me know how it turns out.

Root Cause: 17-Fuckwit. (Not Jake, just the outsourced company and managers who decided to use it.)
x-posted from HuSi.