Problem Ejecting USB Mass Storage Device

do you know the dreaded

"Windows can't stop your 'Generic Volume' device because its in use."

But there might be a solution for developers using Tortoise(CVS|SVN|GIT)

When you are running tortoise it is most likely that you have not reconfigured the default settings.
In icon overlays you can configure in which folders tortoise is putting overlays on the files

using the default settings tortoise opens handles to all fixed drives!

It seems that those handles remain with system after killing the tortoise cache process

However changing this part of the tortoise configuration can make life a lot easier as only the actual source code drive is locked by tortoise.

I am still researching for other possible reasons why this is happening so much on Vista even after sysinternals handle cannot find any handles to the drive in question anymore.....

RemoveDrive on http://www.uwe-sieber.de/drivetools_e.html works best for me so far.
Using WinBubble I managed to add a call to RemoveDrive into the context menu of the disks.
This is what I was always missing for ages on all versions of windows (now Vista) since the advent of USB drives.

(BTW: Vista is working ok when you switch off the transparency gimmick)

The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0150004).

The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0150004). Click on OK to terminate the application.

This can be seen when trying to debug an application on Visual Studio 2008 ... apparently as well as in Visual Studio 2005 !
What happened?
In the debugging properties of the VS Project Configuration you will find an option to merge the environment.
This is after the entry Environment where you can specify additional environment variables.
The pitfall is that the merge env setting also merges the environment helping visual studio to find its debug libraries deeply hidden in the windows installation.

So if you select NO....(= dont merge environment) no more debugging is possible....

We can only wonder about what microsoft has thought about this implicit disable debug property which is caused by some invisible environment variables essential to debug mode.So instead of showing us the essential merged environment variables we are left in the dark.....

Fixing & Cleaning Windows Audio on XP

The windows audio implementation is known for its short cummings.
In particular the Sound,Video,& Game Controller Section has its surprises for the continuous audio users on windows.
This is in the registry under
HKLM\SYSTEM\CCS\Control\Class\{4D36E96C-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

My system sported 83 entries under this section after a few years! I am not surprised that a lot of software fails with this after learning about the limited list of 10 devices for windows audio.

http://www.cakewalk.com/support/kb/kb20090210.asp

After a recent failure of my audio setup I tried a new more severe approach. I identified multiple entries for some of my devices so I thought lets get rid of this and only install the existing ones.
(this is what people normally do with reinstalls, but hey I don't have time to reinstall my hundreds of working apps)
After backing up the list (!) I deleted it completely and restarted.... And see there... upon restart some new entries showed up corresponding to the existing devices!
I know took my .reg backup and identified the matching entries including the top level entry, copied them over to a new file and loaded them into the registry.

This restored the correct Device Manager entries. I could reapply the KB888111 realtek fix. Obviously the complete audio system was broken and I needed to reinstall the drivers, but that was exactly what I wanted!
In combination with the midifix from cakewalk it seems above a lot of problems can be solved like this.


Disclaimer: Don't try this if you don't know what you are doing. With the registry backup its should be fairly safe as you can simply restore the registry using the exported backup.... but