ItsGeekToMe.co

Q: I hope you can help me, or point me in the right direction as MS won’t provide any free assistance.  I’m running Windows XP Home Media.  When I boot up I get the message: “Windows cannot load the users profile but has logged you on with the default profile.  Detail: Insufficient system resources exist to complete requested service.”  When I reboot, everything is perfect.  I did a restore, back to when this started with no effect.  I have not added any new programs, etc. recently.

– Tom C.
Fort Walton Beach, FL

A: This type of problem is tough to research, because I can’t really re-create it on my computer to test fixes.  Fortunately, Tom, you supplied me with a detailed error message, so I researched it by simply putting the error text into Google inside of quotation marks.  After looking through the many web pages that came up, I came to the conclusion that either the cause was an issue with your antivirus software, or your system didn’t have the latest service packs installed.  Your last e-mail to me indicated that you applied the latest Service Pack, and the problem went away.  Readers, don’t forget that you should always be sure that you have the latest versions and service packs installed — particularly when you’re having a problem.  Windows Update can take care of a lot of this for you automatically.

Q: When I receive an e-mail with a picture in it, if I double-click it, the picture opens in the Microsoft Windows Picture and Fax Viewer.  The Viewer always has some seemingly random pictures loaded from previous sessions.  Usually it’s a lot of .gif files from web pages and a couple of my pictures I looked at purposely.  Occasionally, it seems to clean these out of its own accord, but I can’t figure out how to clean them out myself to make it start clean.

– Bill B.
Niceville, FL

A: Bill’s question was only the beginning of a series of e-mails that he and I exchanged back in June.  I don’t have room to re-print all of it here, but the gist of his issue was that when he tried to print a single picture, the Windows P&F Viewer was filled with random pictures and old images from web pages recently visited.  He wasn’t sure if he should delete them, not knowing if they were the originals, or copies.  However, he did want to clean it out, as the files were at best annoying, and at worst, using up system resources.

The answer to Bill’s problem is that the reason he is seeing so many old files is because when you click on an attachment in an e-mail message, a copy gets made in a temporary directory, then a program is launched to load the file.  The temporary directory is used by many other applications (including IE) to cache images, and the P&F viewer has the ability to browse files, so what Bill was actually seeing were all the files recently cached by other applications.  There is a way to discover the location of the temporary directory, but I’m out of room for this week, so I’ll continue this in my next issue.