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OK, so perhaps chaos is a bit of a harsh word here. But the clipboard was recently driving me nuts! All I was trying to do was copy some text to it, and the operation was failing. Of course, as it was an ad hoc app, I didn't have any kind of error handling. The app worked just fine on one system, but running the app on another system (a virtual machine) consistently resulted in failure to copy the text to the clipboard.

Ultimately, I was able to determine what process was preventing my app from putting data in the clipboard, but I haven't yet found a decent workaround for when the problem happens. It's not critical for me, as the act of copying the text to the clipboard is more of a nicety than a requirement.

Anyway, using P/Invoke and System.Diagnostics, I found that vmusrvc.exe - the Virtual PC "Virtual Machine User Services" - had the clipboard open. Using the timestamps from Process Monitor's Profiling Events

This isn’t what I want to be writing about. But a recent discovery compels me to do so. So, I’ve decided to make this an experiment, and beg your apologies that this will not have much technical merit despite the title.

After the last post, Set the Priority of a Process By Name Automatically, in Vista (which probably could have been named a lot better), I discovered that the post had made its way to some other sites. These sites appear to pull content from all over the web, package it up as their own, and toss ads all over it. One is lucky if the site even references the original author or links back to the original location of the post. It’s frustrating, to say the least. I’m all for distribution of knowledge and the like, but that’s taking it too far. Maybe I shouldn’t feel this way, but I (like others) put brain sweat and time into the work I do, and it would be nice if the source of the information would at least be cited if they’re going to republish it without the author’s consent.

So I visited two of these sites (which I have

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The other day I was playing around with the Image File Execution Options and Sysinternals’ Process Monitor, in Vista. I saw an interesting query take place. Using notepad.exe as an example, I saw a query for a key called “PerfOptions” in [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\notepad.exe] when I ran notepad. The result was NAME NOT FOUND, so I decided to rectify that. After adding a key named “PerfOptions”, I ran notepad again. In Process Monitor, I saw queries for four values:

• IoPriority
• PagePriority
• CpuPriorityClass
• WorkingSetLimitInKB

Because of recent explorations with process priorities*, CpuPriorityClass grabbed me right away. Looking at the SetPriorityClass function, one can see the different values for the dwPriorityClass parameter. I created a REG_DWORD named CpuPriorityClass in PerfOptions, and set the value to 0×80 in the hopes that notepad would launch with “HIGH_PRIORITY_CLASS”. Instead, it launched with a priority of NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS (8) - the setting had not made any impact. Then, I set the value to 8 and launched notepad. Notepad launched with a priority of 8. I changed the value to 4, and that had no impact. I changed the value to 0 - no impact. I tried 10 - no impact. I couldn’t see any

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I’ve written about Sysinternals’ Process Monitor utility before:

• Microsoft / Sysinternals Process Monitor
• Using Process Monitor to Troubleshoot Internet Explorer 7 Performance Issues

I have had a few months now to work with Process Monitor, and it certainly is amazing. The filtering capabilities are great, and the fact that the filters are not destructive makes slicing and dicing the data many ways quite simple. The ability to capture all of the data that the utility can capture makes it quite powerful, and the ability to get stack traces for each event is extremely useful.

Going off the observation that Process Monitor is currently at version 1.01, and the assumption that the utility will see further development, I have hopes that the following relatively small ideas will be taken into consideration for future releases, and that further discussion and conversation is sparked.

1) Allow for the use of CTRL+C to copy selected data to the clipboard. Some data can be copied in this fashion, but from my experience not much. In many cases, one can right-click and choose “Copy” from the context menu, but that’s inconvenient. For example, on Event properties, on the Event…