Last Friday Night

So what happened last Friday night? That Quixotic quest that I started with Google Desktop Search? I actually finished it! For whatever reason, I really got perturbed that I couldn't get GDS to run successfully. It didn't help that GDS was sort of teasing me - in that it would run for ten minutes or so before it finally failed. I stayed a bit late at work - uninstalling a piece of software, the installing/re-installing GDS, checking to see if GDS would run, uninstalling the next piece of software, repeat. After I had un-installed eight or nine programs (yes, eight or nine un-installs/re-installs of GDS), GDS finally started running for a bit. Then it failed. Oh great.

That started the next set of troubleshooting procedures - stopping running programs, processes, and services and then checking to see if GDS would run. An hour or so later, I had exhausted everything that I could stop, and GDS still didn't run. Bleh. However, that at least meant, that the conflict had to do with something attaching to explorer.exe and conflicting with GDS. I used Sysinternal's File Monitor to watch the file I/Os (reads, writes, queries) and saw that GDS was accessing one file quite often and failing on that access. I checked the settings set with that file (something to do with Stardock's IconPackager) and made a change. [In the file, the setting went from "Status=2" to "Status=1".] Restarted GDS, and voilà, GDS works. Unbelievable. A single little one character change and it made that much difference.

Completion of that quixotic quest was quite satisfying at the time. Maybe not so much in retrospect (in terms of time wasted...)