a strange problem after upgrading to Windows 7. Some of the connected DVD drives where not recognized by Windows 7. The devices where listed in the device manager with a yellow exclamation mark displaying that there were problems with digital signings.

Windows cannot verify the digital signature for the drivers required for this device. A recent hardware or software change might have installed a file that is signed incorrectly or damaged, or that might be malicious software from an unknown source. (Code 52)

The workaround that helped all users in the forum was to press F8 during boot to turn of digital signing. This would load the drivers for the drives and they could be used normally. This is on the other hand not a perfect solution. To fix the problem that dvd drives are not recognized in Windows 7 permanently do the following:

Option 1:

1. Press Windows R, type regedit and press enter.

2. Open the Registry key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

3. In the right pane, right-click UpperFilters, and then click Delete.

4. Click Yes to confirm the removal of the UpperFilters registry entry.

5. In the right pane, right-click LowerFilters, and then click Delete.

6. Click Yes to confirm the removal of the LowerFilters registry entry.

7. Exit Registry Editor, and then restart the computer.

Note After you remove the UpperFilters registry entry and the LowerFilters registry entry, you may lose functionality in certain programs such as CD recording programs. In this scenario, you must reinstall any affected programs. If the problem recurs, contact the program vendor to determine whether an update is available for the program.

Option 2:

Click on Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Right click Command Prompt -> Run as administrator.

Paste the following line and hit enter afterwards

bcdedit /set loadoptions DDISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS

This should solve the problem of DVD drives not being recognized in Windows 7.

If you install Windows 7 on another hard drive or partition on your computer system you might notice that the partition of the other operating system is not showing up in Windows 7. This happened to a dual boot system on a test laptop with Windows Vista being the initial system and Windows 7 being installed on another partition.

The reason for this is that the drive letter of the Windows Vista partition is not assigned in Windows 7 meaning the Vista partition does not have a drive letter and can therefor not be displayed in Windows 7. Here is how to fix that.

Click the Windows key, enter diskmgmt.msc and press the enter key. This will open the Disk Management interface that is displaying all connected hard drives and partitions.

All you need to do is to select the partition with the missing drive letter in the lower half of the screen (where it say Disk 0, Disk 1 and so on) and right-click it.

Select Change Drive Letter And Path from the context menu. Click on the Add button in the next menu and pick a drive letter from the pulldown menu.

A click on OK finishes the processes and the Windows Vista partition (or any other that was missing) should now be visible in Windows Explorer.

Earlier this week, Microsoft warned that there was a serious MP3 corruption issue in the Windows 7 beta (build 7000), which has been making the rounds on piracy networks. The company promised a fix, and it has now arrived. Regardless of where you got the beta from, I strongly recommend that you download and install this patch: 32-bit and 64-bit. The accompanying KB article 961367 has not yet been posted as of publishing time. Nevertheless, the Microsoft Download Center describes the fix as follows:

Install this update to resolve live and recorded TV issues in Windows Media Center, recorded TV playback issues in Windows Media Player, and MP3 file corruption issues in Windows. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer. This update is provided to you and licensed under the Windows 7 Pre-Release License Terms.

As you can see, Microsoft took the opportunity to fix other issues in the beta with this patch. Still, the most critical of the issues fixed was MP3 corruption. Here's how the corruption occurs: the first few seconds of an MP3 file will be cut if the header of the mp3 file is larger than 16 kilobytes and if metadata is written to the file. The corruption will occur either when the user edits the metadata from inside WMP12 or Explorer, or if WMP12 is set to automatically fill in missing metadata using the online service. The changes are irreversible, so make sure to install this patch before you play back any of your MP3s.

This is probably the most serious bug that has been discovered in the Windows 7 beta, and it's a good thing that it was, because Microsoft is about to give it out to the public in a couple of hours.

I don’t know how I missed it (well, I suspect it’s related to quirks in the method(s) in which Microsoft makes notifications of new KB articles available), but it seems that Microsoft has released an update to Internet Explorer 7 to address the performance issues with the Phishing Filter that I had previously (here and here) encountered.

The KB article (The computer may respond very slowly as the Phishing Filter evaluates Web page contents in Internet Explorer 7) is dated December 12, 2006, and contains links to download pages for various versions of Windows that Internet Explorer 7 can run on. Your copy of Windows has to pass the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) check before Microsoft will allow you to download the fix. Once downloaded, installation is straightforward; depending on what programs you have open at the time, you may be required to reboot after the installation finishes.

It is interesting to note that the Cause section (below) explains exactly the conditions I was operating in, and the behavior I observed.

---

CAUSE

This problem occurs when one or more of the following conditions are true:
• The Web page contains many frames.
• You browse many frames in a short time.
Internet Explorer 7 evaluates the whole Web page when you browse a frame. Therefore, CPU usage may be very high.

---

Additionally, the workaround (at the bottom of the article) is to disable the Phishing Filter on the “Advanced” tab of the “Internet Options”.

Prior to installing the update, I set the Phishing Filter to “Turn off automatic website checking” (”Advanced” tab of “Internet Options”) and made sure it was “Enabled” for the Internet Explorer Security Zone I was working in. I then verified that I was able to recreate the behavior I witnessed in The Case of the Sluggish Internet Explorer 7.

I installed the update and needed to reboot (I forgot I had SharpReader open, and it had loaded MSHTML.DLL). Upon reboot I attempted to cause the CPU to spike by doing precisely the things that had caused the problem in the past. I didn’t have any luck in doing so. In fact, none of the threads in the iexplore.exe process were consuming an inordinate amount of CPU. It would appear that the fix involved, to some extent at least, changing the technique Internet Explorer uses to queue up requests to have something evaluated by the Phishing Filter (previously, I had hypothesized that Internet Explorer 7 was using the ThreadPool API and was creating a new thread for each request). Based on my explorations so far, the fix takes care of the problem. Kudos to Microsoft for recognizing the problem and taking appropriate steps to address it.

The fix updates 2 Windows / Internet Explorer program files in %windir%\system32 - ieapfltr.dll (the “Microsoft Phishing Filter”) and mshtml.dll (the “Microsoft (R) HTML Viewer”). I didn’t take the time to save off copies of the previous versions of these DLLs to try to compare differences (perhaps an exercise for another day). However, the new MSHTML.DLL has a date of 2006-11-09, and the new IEAPFLTR.DLL has a date of 2006-11-08. Internet Explorer 7.0 was released on 2006-10-18. So it appears that Microsoft knew of problems with the Phishing Filter performance prior to launch; obviously this wasn’t a showstopper issue. It also would appear to have taken just over 1 month for the fix to make its way through the testing / release process. I guess that’s not too bad, considering that some high-priority / critical security updates take at least that long. On the other hand, this is a new feature so it didn’t have the legacy behind it that some of the security updates have to contend with. I guess I should just be happy to have a fix… ;)

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