Gray “X’s” when navigating network shares

I had a user getting grey X’s when accessing a network share.  I tried some of the standard fixes including trying to get to other mapped drives, the internet, logoff-logon.  Nothing worked.  I started searching and found this post from SevenForums.  I tried it and it worked…

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Windows 7 Imaging Product Key Error Message

I am using Microsofts imaging (Imagex.exe) tools to set up Windows 7 Machines.  I have switched between Enterprise and Professional versions of Windows 7.  It turns out the imaging tools don’t like that.

If you get error “the product key entered does not match any of the Windows images available for installation” Go to the ei.cfg file in installation files and change the version from Enterprise to Professional or other way around.

Update the BIOS before installing Windows 7 on a Dell Optiplex 760

I tried installing Windows 7 Enterprise x64 on a Dell Optiplex 760.  I used the Windows Media.  The installation was so slow that I didn’t let it complete.  I tried a 32bit version and there was no difference.  I did some searching online and found a comment on Microsoft’s site that updating the BIOS should work.

I was using BIOS version A02.  Updating to the latest version (A08) worked.

I then had a problem where the Windows 7 installer couldn’t see the physical hard drives.  I went into the BIOS and changed the SATA mode from its default setting to something which I don’t currently remember and it worked.  Windows detected the disk drives.

I’ve seen talk about installing the drivers and the problem goes away, but that’s not practical in manual pre-installation.

Error 1327.Invalid Drive: [drive letter] while installing or updating Adobe Acrobat

Another in the long list of annoying Adobe issues is the “Error 1327.Invalid Drive: [drive letter] while installing or updating Adobe Acrobat” error.  It comes up when installing Adobe Acrobat 9 or Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 or X on Windows 7 Enterprise on machines with mapped network drives.  It may also come up with other versions of Windows 7.  I don’t know if it’s an issue on machines with multiple physical or logical drives (E, F, G, etc.).

It has not been a major issue for me because I have found that installing with the local admin profile which doesn’t map drives works.  I don’t know what happens if it tries to auto-update on the profiles with mapped drives.  Users aren’t permitted to update software, so it shouldn’t be an issue there.  I also suspect that this won’t be an issue if you dump software using a tool.

Adobe has a KB article about it here.