New Windows XP Vulnerability – How To Fix It

There’s a new vulnerability in Windows XP concerning parts of the Help and Support system. It was found by a Google researcher who posted the flaw just five days after talking with Microsoft about it. Evidently Microsoft wasn’t addressing the issue fast enough for him, raising a bit of a backlash from the community for not giving Microsoft time to respond.

Whatever the case, the exploit is now in the wild and XP machines are vulnerable to drive-by attacks on evil web sites.

It affects Windows XP’s Help and Support functions. Anything using the HCP protocol (hcp:// URI’s) is subject to unauthorized commands.

The easiest way to fix it is to go to Microsoft’s ‘Fix it’ page. You can fix it and, if you don’t like what happens, unfix it from the same site. Pretty cool.

This can also be manually done by following these simple directions:

1. Click Start, and then Run.
2. Enter regedit, and click OK.
3. Expand HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, and then highlight the HCP key.
4. Right-click and Export the ‘Selected Branch’ to be on the safe side.
5. Right-click the HCP key, and then click Delete.

I read that it may cause some problems in your Control Panel, but I’ve tried most of the links and everything seems to be working on my XP computer.

[Editor's Note: This vulnerability was fixed in this month's Windows Update (July 13th), so make sure your computer is set to update Windows automatically or open your IE browser and go to Tools/Windows Update to download the security patch].
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Free PC Troubleshooter From Microsoft

Microsoft has just come out with a free computer troubleshooter at their FixIt Center. It’s still in beta mode but I gave it a whirl. The video below is a quick demo of the PC troubleshooter…

It works on the following Operating Systems:

• Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3)
• Windows XP Pro (64-bit) Service Pack 2 (SP2)
• Windows Vista, Windows 7
• Windows Server 2003 SP2
• Windows Server 2008
• Windows Server 2008 R2

The tool is fairly limited right now but we’ll see if they expand it in the future.

Two other resources I’ve found for solving computer problems are:

The Windows Secrets Lounge. This is a forum dealing with Windows covering the last 10 years. They’ve just modernized it so it can be spidered by the search engines but there’s still unindexed stuff you can find by searching the forum directly.

Another option if your system is all screwed up and you don’t want to have to reformat and reinstall Windows is called Reimage.

You download and run it on your Windows computer and it ‘refurbishes’ your operating system without having to reinstall all of your data and software.

It used to just work on XP computers but now works on Vista and Windows 7 as well. We’ve used it on several client’s computers and it works like a charm, especially after a virus infection.

It’s less than $50 for one key (good indefinitely on that one computer) or less than $70 for three keys. You can also create a boot CD with Reimage on it for computers that won’t load Windows at all..
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Video – How To Show File Extensions

Below is a quick video on how to view file extensions in both Windows XP and Vista…

This is so stupid. Microsoft doesn’t believe you can handle all of that extraneous information, like what kind of file type you are dealing with.

Just follow the steps in the video above and for God’s sake don’t start a war with that secret information you obtain without Microsoft’s knowledge!.
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