The View From Wisconsin

Sometimes, the smallest thing is what causes Windows to act funny.

I was having all sorts of issues with the Sound and Audio Devices control panel in Windows XP. In particular, my Volume Control icon was no longer in the System Tray (the little box on the far side of the Start bar).

I happened to play around a bit on the wife's laptop to see if I could determine what was being accessed when you clicked on the Sound control panel. After taking a good look in Task Manager, I determined that rundll32.exe was opening every time I opened the control panel - which makes sense, since rundll32 is one of the few files in the Windows hierarchy that can cause the entire thing to fall apart.

I fired up the Command line, switched over to the i386 directory, and did the following:

expand rundll32.ex_ c:\windows\system32\rundll32.exe

Sure enough, after I closed the Command line box, I opened the control panel, clicked on "show volume control on taskbar", hit "Apply" and boom there it is.

Part of me is happy that I figured this out. Part of me is shaking my head that the idiots in Redmond couldn't do something to keep this from happening.