Greg's House of Treats

Disabling Win2K services

I'm trying to find all the Win2K services I can disable. I started with the following and will disable more as I go.

Alerter: Automatic -> Disabled
ClipBook: Manual -> Disabled
Messenger: Automatic -> Disabled
Simple TCP/IP Services: Automatic -> Disabled
Fax Service: Manual -> Disabled
Remote Registry Service: Automatic -> Disabled
Telnet: Manual -> Disabled
TCP/IP NetBios Helper Service: Automatic -> Disabled

Related links:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/deploy/prodspecs/win2ksvc.mspx

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/kbase/WindowsTips/Windows2000/UserTips/Network/Disableunnecessaryservicestoimproveworkstationsperformance.html

http://www.techspot.com/tweaks/win2k_services/print.shtml (esp note recovery procedure)

http://www.governmentsecurity.org/articles/Windows2000Security.php

http://www.enco.com/new/WhitePaper/ENCOrecommendation%20OSopt.pdf

Application error running help from msvc6

This one took a long time to fix, probably over a year. What happened was every time I tried to use context sensitive help (pressing F1) in MSVC6, I got the following symptoms:

1) Help would come up, but I wouldn't get the right entry
2) The index was empty, and searching the index yielded "Selection is not associated with any topic. Please try again."
3) Closing the help caused an MSVC to crash with an "Application Error"

Today I found the answer. Since my system is a fully patched Win2K/SP4, there is special magic you are supposed to do after running a previous patch that I somehow missed. You have to unregister and re-register the HTML Help ActiveX control. Here it is:

regsvr32 /u C:\winnt\system32\hhctrl.ocx
regsvr32 C:\winnt\system32\hhctrl.ocx

See the following link for details:

http://www.thescripts.com/forum/thread79979.html