Sunday, October 14, 2007

Fixing the red menu_HelpPopup_reportertoolmenu error in Netscape Navigator

A friend told me today his Netscape Navigator is screwed. The main window showed in the bottom a red error message <menuitem id="menu_HelpPopup_reportertoolmenu"

menu_HelpPopup_reportertoolmenu

I was about to tell him to disable his Navigator Add-Ons, when Netscape downloaded and upgraded my Navigator from build 9.0b3 to 9.0rc1, and I started seeing the same problem.

I searched a bit the net and found out the menu_HelpPopUp_reportertoolmenu is related to a Reporter add-on that ships with SeaMonkey (who came up with this name anyway?!). The Website Reporter Tool [Help-->Report Broken Web Site] that is used by Netscape and Firefox does not select correctly its language sometimes and cause this error to appear.

There were a couple of solutions proposed:
- delete a file chrome.cdf in your profile (more info)
- switch to another language and back (more info)
- uninstall the extension (more info) either by manually messing with the same chrome.cdf or using Chrome Manager

None of the proposed solutions worked for me (I don't have a chrome.cdf file in my profile or at least I didn't find it, I have no idea how to switch languages or at least what I've tried had no effect, I had no add-ons installed for Netscape that I could uninstall, and the Chrome Manager part of Mnenhy installed but was hanging up on opening the manager window).

What worked eventually for me was:
- Close Netscape Navigator
- Go to C:\Program Files\Netscape\Navigator 9\chrome folder (or the Chrome subfolder of your Navigator install folder)
- Locate 2 files reporter.jar and Reporter.manifest and delete them
- Restart Netscape Navigator and the red <menuitem id="menu_HelpPoppp_reportertoolmenu" error message should be now gone.

Saturday, October 6, 2007

"Service CyberLink Background Capture Service (CBCS) hung on starting" and slow Vista logon on HP tx1000

A couple of days ago I bought a HP tx1000 laptop, and I noticed something weird: everytime I was logging on to Vista the screen become black, and the computer appeared to do nothing for a very long period of time; eventually the desktop appeared and things got back to normal.

I knew something was wrong and I was planning to run eventually some monitoring software to track this down. Fortunately, it was not necessary: Vista came to rescue. When I woke today the laptop from sleep the "Problem Reports and Solutions" dialog popped up, asking to send Microsoft a "Service hung report" for a "ClCapSvc" program. I had 7 of these reports to send, so I set to investigate further.

Service CyberLink Background Capture Service (CBCS) hung on starting

I looked in EventViewer, and the error there was reported as:
"The CyberLink Background Capture Service (CBCS) service is marked as an interactive service. However, the system is configured to not allow interactive services. This service may not function properly."

The service was registered in Services as:
    CyberLink Background Capture Service (CBCS)
Provides background buffering, recording and burning functionality for CyberLink Capturing
"C:\Program Files\HP\QuickPlay\Kernel\TV\CLCapSvc.exe"


I also noticed another related service, that was failing, too:
    CyberLink Task Scheduler (CTS)
Enables a user to configure and schedule a automated task for CyberLink Scheduling
"C:\Program Files\HP\QuickPlay\Kernel\TV\CLSched.exe"


So, the mystery was solved.
For me the service was installed as part of HP QuickPlay application, and it's used most likely for recording TV shows (and the other service for scheduling TV shows to be recorded as specific times). It's unclear to me why these services were intalled and automatically started, as I don't even have a TV tuner card!

It looks like the service comes with other software like Cyberlink PowerCinema, that was probably licensed by HP and repackaged into QuickPlay. Other users had similar problems... http://www.vistax64.com/vista-hardware-devices/78245-cyberlink-background-capture-service.html.

Solution 1: Disable the service. In Start menu, type and run Computer Management, select the Services node in the tree, and in the right pane select "CyberLink Background Capture Service (CBCS)". Right click the service, use Properties dialog to set the service to Disabled (Setting to Manual doesn't help, as during the boot some other crappy application will attempt to use the service causing it to start again). Ok the Properties dialog and repeat the procedure for the second service, CyberLink Task Scheduler (CTS).

Solution 2: The version of the CLCapSvc.exe file on my machine was 5.0.2510, and it was part of Hp QuickPlay 3.2. HP offers on its website an updated version of the program, HP QuickPlay Web Update 3.20A. Uninstalling the old version and installing the new one upgraded the file to version 5.0.2819, which doesn't seem to hangup on boot.

Since I don't need TV capture, I choose to apply both solutions...