Chris123NT's Blog

As you all know, I posted last night that Microsoft have made the CEIP fix available through the action center.  So when you hit the bug it will actually pop up and tell you exactly how to fix it.

I want to pass on a message I received from a Microsoft employee.

The fix in the action center will be permanent, you will not have to repeatedly fix it.

Here is the statement from Microsoft on the issue, as seen on Mary Jo’s blog:

Microsoft deployed a configuration change which exposed this (installer) problem. New machines installing Windows 7 Beta will not experience this problem. An issue related to the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP also known as SQM) client in the Windows 7 Beta is causing crashes of Explorer, MSI-based installers and other applications. In order to resolve the issue, impacted customers need to run the following script from an elevated command prompt. This script will stop crashes related to CEIP and removes those changes (registry keys) to prevent further CEIP related crashes.

I recommend that you ALL turn the Customer Experience Improvement Program back ON.  In order to do that, do the following:

1. Open gpedit.msc
2. Expand Computer Configuration, expand Administrative Templates, expand System, expand Internet Communication Management, and then click Internet Communication settings.
3. In the details pane, double-click Turn off Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program, and then click Disabled.

That’s it, that should turn CEIP back on, and with Microsoft’s published fix in action center you will be good to go.

NOTE: I have also updated the old post with the fix instructions as to no longer instruct people to disable CEIP.

So remember the issue I talked about two posts down about the Explorer and MSI crashes?  I was playing around tonight and made the issue happen again to test something, and this little guy popped up:

So as you can see, Microsoft have acknowledged the issue and posted the fix.  Looks familiar doesn’t it?

Also one thing I would like to note for everyone.  CEIP is one of Microsoft’s biggest avenues for feedback in betas especially.  You may want to turn it back on.  Although turning it back on may cause the issue to come back periodically, at least the action center will pop up telling you HOW to fix it now.

As many of you undoubtedly know already, in Windows 7 Beta 1, disabling UAC also causes the gadgets to stop working.  This can be very annoying, especially for the power users who turn off UAC, or for those who are turning it of in order to avoid that nasty token elevation bug that rears it’s ugly head out of random on some machines.

The reason for this is that Microsoft made the assumption that the sidebar process would never be run in an elevated state.  So when you try to start it with UAC disabled it detects that it would have to run elevated, so it just does nothing to abide by the pre-set rules set by Microsoft.  Thankfully there is an undocumented registry setting to correct this issue.

1. Open Registry Editor (regedit.exe)
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Sidebar\Settings
3. Create a new DWORD Value called AllowElevatedProcess
4. Set the value of the new DWORD to 1
5. Close the registry editor.  Your gadgets should work now.  No reboot or anything necessary.

So there you have it, an actual fix to the issue that doesn’t require swapping out the sidebar executable like some sites suggest *cough* mydigitallife *cough*.

Many users have started experiencing random crashing of explorer and msiexec.exe when trying to start Windows Update or install anything that uses an MSI based installer.  This issue is bad enough that some people have even formatted because of it, only to have it come back again.

Rafael has discovered that the fault lies with the SQM Client which is part of the Customer Experience Improvement Program.  It seems that ANY process that calls WinSqmStartSession in ntdll.dll will start crashing when MachineThrottling is enabled in the registry, which seems to happen as a result of CEIP running.

Use the following to fix the issue.

1. Open a Command Prompt as Administrator
2. Type reg delete HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows\DisabledSessions /va /f and press enter.
3. That’s it, no further action is necessary