Backtalk

November/December 1998

The MSDN Answer Team

The MSDN Answer Team would like to invite all of you to participate in our Developer Chats. We currently host one or two online chats a week, on a myriad of subjects of interest to developers. Our hosts are sometimes Microsoft developers, sometimes Support folks or Product Managers, and often authors of Microsoft Press books and Microsoft Systems Journal columnists.

They are all experts in their fields and are more than willing to spend an hour answering questions about the technologies they work with. For further information, please see http://msdn.microsoft.com/developer/chat/default.htm.

Charlie T. writes: Please send me my password.

Dear Charlie,

Which password?

Do you mean your password for accessing the MSDN Library Online (which you won't need much as long as your cookie is intact)? Or do you mean your password for the MSDN Subscriber Downloads area (a different story altogether)?

First, please remember that there is a difference. To obtain your password (the one you chose when you registered) for MSDN Online, to access the MSDN Library, Knowledge Base, MSDN Online member third-party downloads, and the Support Online site, you'll need to use the e-mail password function on the registration wizard. Just go to http://register.microsoft.com/regwiz/forms/pic.asp and click e-mail my password from the left-hand side.

If you forget your user ID for the preceding sites, that one is easy—it's the e-mail address you gave when you registered.

If you are trying to access the MSDN Subscriber Downloads site and can't remember your password, there are several things to consider. First of all, you must be a paying MSDN Subscriber—up-to-date and active. If in fact you are a subscriber, there are two possible scenarios:

1. If you have the correct Microsoft Online ID (the ID you selected when you first registered for MSDN Subscriber Downloads) but still fail authentication, you will have the option of receiving your password through e-mail. Just try to log on without a password and keep trying until you get a page titled "Authentication failed" that gives you an option (#3) to have your password e-mailed to you.
   
   
2. If you cannot remember either your user name or your password, please call MSDN Customer Service at 1-800-759-5474. They can also assist if the e-mail address you are entering into the form doesn't work. It is possible that you didn't give one when you bought your subscription, so they will need to enter it into the database for you.

Most of you probably know by now that in order to get the latest version of the MSDN Library installed, you have to uninstall the old version. We have received a lot of mail from subscribers who are having trouble doing this through the Uninstall option in Windows.

When uninstalling previous versions of the MSDN Library, if the Add/Remove Programs option does not work, you can manually clean up the registry to "uninstall" the MSDN InfoViewer and all registered titles.

Please note that this procedure will uninstall all InfoViewer 5 titles.

Warning   Editing your system registry is not without risk. Make a backup first. If you are unfamiliar with the regedit utility, we recommend that you read through the registry Help topics before proceeding.

Use regedit.exe to delete the following registry key completely:

\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\InfoViewer\5.0

After deleting this key you should reboot and then install the latest MSDN Library release.

Did you have some issues when trying to register your copy of Visual Studio? We've ironed those wrinkles out and it's smooth sailing now, so please try again! The registration page is at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/register/default.asp.

It is also important to note that if you only intend to register one component of Visual Studio, such as Visual Basic or Visual C++, you will need to do it through the Visual Studio registration page at the URL just mentioned and not through the individual product registration pages.

We've seen a lot of mail recently from people who are just dying to learn all the details about migrating their servers from Windows NT 4.0 to 5.0. Well, wonder no more. Just surf on over to the Windows NT Server 5.0 Technical Papers site at www.microsoft.com/WindowsNT5. The Windows NT 5.0 team has just added a heap of new papers for your perusal, one of which is entitled "Migrating from Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 to Windows NT Server 5.0." See www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/bin/nts/nt4tont5.exe.