Programs not opening correctly

[badpolarbear]

I have a friend who is involved with a fairly large rollout of new pc's for public use, about 780 of them. They have found a problem. Lets say I have Microsoft Word up on the screen. If I open Adobe Photoshop it should open on top of Word but its not, it is opening behind Word. So If I had Word full screen and opened Photoshop the only place I would see Photoshop is in the taskbar, it is hidden behind Word.. Is there a setting to make these open properly?

Ah yes, they are using Windows XP.

[icecube]

badpolarbear

Are you building an image on one computer and then syspreping it and ghosting it to the other 780?

There could be several issues here. The first thing I would suggest is to build a new image of XP with Word/Office with all of the updates. Don't install Office from the cd, copy it to the hard drive and install it from there.

Then install Photoshop. If its still performing the same, I would email /call Adobe and describe your problem. You've got to be certain about the cure, 780 units individually fixed out in the field later on, will kill ya.

It kind of sounds like and older program's dll is overwriting a newer one. What software is going into the build? Is your client forcing you to use older software on the installs because of license costs, ie these licenses are old but paid for?

There are some real incompatibility issues of, "You can't get there from here," with some of the older software in newer O/S's.

[badpolarbear]

Thanks for the reply icecube. Perhaps I can clarify the situation a little. Less than a year ago these people purchased about 1,500 pcs and set them up with Server 2003. After having so many problems they decided to recall them and install XP. They are ghosting approximately 25 machines at a time. My mention of Adobe was just an example. It doesnt matter what programs they open. To simplify it, you pick any two programs to open that you feel like.

In the picture below you can see there are two active boxes, the "Message Box" and the "Active Window" because they are in focus. The " Inactive Window" in the background is considered inactive because it is not in focus or what some people call grayed out. Now what is happening is the exact opposite in their case. When they open any two programs the "Inactive Window" would be in the foreground and the "Active Window" and the "Message Box" would be in the background.



So far after consulting with several people we have come to a few conclusions.
1. That the installs are corrupt, something has gone wrong with the ghosting.
2. That some dll file has been corrupted.
3. That the machines have some kind of malware or virus on them when they come in for service.

I am almost sorry I got involved in a third party effort here. An attempt was made in another forum on the net to get some or one of the techs involved in the posts but unfortunately their firewalls in place will not allow them to access the forums. This particular problem has caused some real head scratching. I would like to have been able to help them in respect that it might have given me a foot in the door for a job when I finish my MCSE course next spring. Once again thanks for the reply icecube.

[icecube]

Hey Badpolarbear,

I would assume that the image machine works perfectly otherwise they wouldn't want to use that for an image.

I know that Ghost 7.0 had some image problems with hard drives larger than 80gig?? I'm not sure of the size, but I think that size was the issue

Ghost 8.0 works real good on NTFS and not so good on some Linux builds.

I use the Sysprep from System Builder Disks (Buy 6 disks and you get a system builder disk). I've never checked to see if the 2000 Sysprep is the same as the XP Sysprep--it may NOT be. Plus Microsoft just came out with a new Sysprep for XP. Check to see that they are using the right program (especially if SP2 is involved).

I would check to see if you are using at least Ghost 8 , I am not familiar with Ghost 9. I've had issues with Ghost 7.0 and NTFS on large drives.

As a test, try ghosting the image to a 32 gig or less drive and see if it funtions ok. If it does, then we know that either Sysprep or Ghost is suspect.


P.S.
I can't believe that you are busting the machines to XP. I'm busting XP machines left and right to Windows 2000 so we can join them to the network--go figure!

Hope this is of some help, good luck

[badpolarbear]

Thanks for the input icecube. I will certainly pass the info on. This is a classic case of lets fix something that isnt broken. They were running 2000 before they went to Server 2003 and then ditching that and moving to XP. 2000 was working fine but naturally they need to have the latest in technology. A lot of tax payers dollars have gone into breaking something that was reliable.

Edit:
Another factor has been brought into play here. There was a mention of Ingineum being involved. After doing some reasearch I found that a few European establishments have found it to be frustrating and very time consuming. There seems to be some network connectivity issues between PC's and mobile units. Perhaps this could be one of those issues?