February 2009

By aaron.axvig, Thu, 02/19/2009 - 03:00

After pounding my head at this off-and-on over the last five weeks (previously thwarted), I have mashed enough VBScript skills into it (my head) that I figured out how to script the pinning of items to the taskbar.

 

Set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application")
Set objFolder = objShell.Namespace("C:\")
Set objApp = objFolder.ParseName("Notepad.lnk")
For Each verb in objApp.Verbs()
If verb.Name = "Pin to Tas&kbar" Then verb.DoIt
Next

For this to work, you need to have a valid shortcut Notepad.lnk in C:\.  To do a pin to the start menu, replace “Pin to Tas&kbar” with “Pin to Start Men&u”.  Yes, you need the ampersands, they are there as keyboard shortcuts.  Right-click on a shortcut and push K and it will pin that to the taskbar.

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By aaron.axvig, Thu, 02/05/2009 - 03:00

I encountered an issue at work when we wanted to add some gadgets to the Vista Sidebar.  Upon opening the Add Gadget panel, all of the available gadgets briefly appeared and then faded out, leaving a blank window.

This can be resolved by resetting the user’s Settings.ini file for the Sidebar.  This is located at %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar.  Just rename Settings.ini to something else after you close Sidebar (must be closed from system tray too), and then re-launch Sidebar.  A new Settings.ini will be created.  All of the user’s Sidebar settings will be reset, but at least they are now able to add gadgets.

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