Battle Net Client has 10-15 sec freezes on win7 x64 - performance

problem:
The Battle Net client responds to user input with long freezes (10-15 seconds) when selecting games, etc.
As far as I know, this is only a win7 x64 issue, although this is not confirmed.
note:
This is an archive of the solution that was posted a few years ago on Reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Blizzard/comments/7kol9s/battlenet_app_keeps_freezing/
The Blizzard forums stopped supporting the old links and every discussion about the topic led to this post describing the solution, that is sadly no longer available:
https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/20753715303#post-4
I've added the solution on StackOverflow to keep the sacred knowledge.

solution:
go to: Start Menu -> Edit Group Policy
this opens the Local Group Policy Editor
go to User Configuration/Windows Settings/Internet Explorer Maintenance/Connection/Automatic Browser Configuration
Uncheck the "automatically detect configuration settings" checkbox
The Battle Net client should now respond quickly to user inputs.

Related

RunAs/Remote Desktop Windows Security - A Device attached to this device is not functioning correctly

Good Afternoon, never seen this one before in my years of working with Windows but im at a loss to try and find the solution to this one.
When users log on to their desktops as Non-Admin accounts, there are particular applications they need to run as different users due to the way some of the systems work. A load of system policies where updated for security at group policy level however now something strange is happening when the user initiates a RunAs by holding the shift key down or if they attempt to remote desktop to another machine, the NLA Windows Security box that prompts for credentials takes 5/10 minutes to appear.
When the user hovers over the taskbar icon, then over the window without clicking the Windows Security box displays as full screen missing the username and password box but when you click on it nothing happens and just disappears. Eventually after a few minutes the windows security box will appear and can log in as normal however the users jump into systems adhoc and cant be waiting for minutes at a time to put their credentials in which could cost a lot of user down time during the day.
I have tried looking at the security log but as you can imagine its filled with all sorts and trying to locate one specifically without knowing the issue is difficult at best. Has anyone had this issue before that can point me in any direction. I have to assume this is permission related on the devices trying to access something locally because when i log on to the devices with an account in the administrators group all these issues disappear and the windows security works as normal. Also, if they click "Run as administrator" they get the UAC credential box so i don't believe this is UAC related as its working by design just anything with "Windows Security" prompts. I should point out that whilst this is waiting - the File Explorer icon highlights under "Run As" like the explorer is waiting to do something.
OS - Windows 10 Pro
Acc - Domain Joined
Group policy enabled
Local Policy Disabled
Update: 21H2
Never seen this before but hoping one of you legends has!
Dev
Full Screen Box - Screenshot
For anyone reading this - although bizzare as it is...
It turns out it was McAfee Disk Encryption - there was a bug in the local FDE security provider causing it to hang every time it was accessed.
Update your McAfee FDE Client/Agent to the latest version

Why did my Microsoft Add-in suddenly stop showing as an option in F12 devtools?

At one point I was able to see our Outlook add-in app in the target options in f12 devtools for troubleshooting, but sometime last month it stopped showing up there. My colleagues are stumped, and I can't find much online in the way of troubleshooting.
I tried checking my Windows version and Outlook version against others who can see it in their devtools, but we're all on Windows 10 enterprise v1803, Outlook v1910, and IE 11. I've tried many things over the month since this happened like rebooting my PC, making sure I have the latest updates from IT, refreshing the options, running some commands I found online for targeting the right browser for devtools, etc. No change.
Another peculiar thing is that I'm seeing some completely different things in the Add-in than they are, like button alignments and div widths and such. I had our dev environment looking perfect on my end, but when a few people on the team screenshared with me there were a number of styling issues I can't reproduce. Even weirder, nobody experiences these issues in O365, it's just the desktop Outlook app on our Windows machines.
Any ideas on how to troubleshoot this would be very greatly appreciated.
Steps I take to produce the issue:
Click on manifest icon for our app in Outlook ribbon. App loads in the sidebar.
Open F12 devtools (both 32 and 64 bit for good measure from the System32 and SysWOW64 directories).
App is not in the target list. Click refresh, still not in the list.
FYI, any IE 11 windows I have open show up there, just not my app.
Starting in Windows 10 version 1903, the latest version of Office will use Edge WebView instead of IE to render add-ins. Edge WebView requires a different debugger (not the F12 debugger) called Microsoft Edge DevTools. You can find out more about it here.

Facebook Gameroom

Facebook Gameroom application in my laptop doesn't open at all after installation. I used it for a while but suddenly it stopped launching. Application does meet all the minimum software and hardware requirements of my system. No matter how many times I uninstall and reinstall, the application doesn't open at all. Even I restarted the system many times. Do I need to format and reinstall OS? Reporting the same in Facebook is of no use, they won't respond at all. Any advises would be of great help.
Try installing Service Pack 1 on Windows 7, you can search the 32bit or 64bit installation on Microsoft page. When you install SP1, re-install Facebook Gameroom.
Otherwise:
Run Facebook Gameroom, wait for at least 5 minutes for program to get auto-updates if there is any and it should launch [my facebook gameroom window appears 3 minutes later after launch]
There is a way to launch:
- Open facebook.com on Firefox browser
- Open the game (any game) with "open in game room" button
- Firefox maybe ask for the correct application. Choose game room.
I have no idea why the direct access icon is not working :(
Just the internet connection problem. Sorry to trouble.

Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 - How to Stop Annoying Notifications

Just installed Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 and now I see this annoying red notification telling me I need a developer licence for Windows Store and Windows Phone - which I do not need.
Once I click dismiss all, it comes back next time I load Visual Studio, the same notification I dismissed. In other words how many times will it tell me I need a licence? So my point is how do I stop displaying the red notification.
[edit]
Actually it's prompting me every so often not just every visual studio restart... as I think someone has mentioned in one of the comments.
LATEST UPDATE (Nov-21):
We have now released a patch for this bug. You can download it from here.
I'm leaving the rest of this answer as is but there should no longer be a need for any workaround once the patch linked to above has been applied.
ORIGINAL ANSWER:
I'll start by apologizing and confirming we've got at least one bug here (if not more). There are several of us actively investigating this on our side. We don't yet know the full extent of the problem though so it would be great to get some additional information from anyone who's currently running into this.
The intent was to show a notification to users working on Windows or Windows Phone Store apps. It was not something that should be coming up for users not doing Store development.
The most promising workaround so far is to:
Close the currently open solution (if there is one loaded)
Dismiss the notification
Close Visual Studio
You shouldn't see the notification again in subsequent VS sessions until you do something that causes the Store related functionality to load again (e.g., create or load a Store app project).
If this doesn't make it go away, please respond and we'll try to work with you to get more details on what could be causing it to continue to appear for you.
UPDATE:
If the above workaround doesn't work for you (e.g., ReSharper users), I've got another one that should at least provide a respite from the notifications for about a month at a time:
Make sure the critical notification is currently active (i.e., red notification).
Close all open instances of Visual Studio.
Open up File Explorer and navigate to the %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\Notifications directory.
Open the Notifications_Active.xml file found in in a text editor.
Find the notification element referring to the developer license.
Change the value of the Severity element to 0 instead of 2.
This should make the red alert no longer kick in for this notification as long as you leave the notification active (i.e., do not dismiss it).

How do I make WebDev clean up its tooltray "tracks"?

After I've shut down a VS 2008 web project, well, a lot of times, I see many instances of the WebDev icon in the "tooltray" / system notification area:
These are no longer active instances; they were shut down by VS.
When I mouse over any of these, Windows Vista "conveniently" collapses the tray for me. This makes life miserable if the app I want is in between any of them (e.g., Outlook in the image above), and even worse if I actually want to right click on the "active" WebDev.
Any idea how I can get VS, WebDev, or Windows to fix this behavior?
There is a utility on CodeProject that does this: TrayIconBuster
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/system/TrayIconBuster.aspx
It runs every x minutes and removes all phantom icons...
Not the perfect solution, because I think this should be built in to Windows...

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