I nearly tore my left arm off to use as a club for smashing my computer tonight. A while ago at work we began migrating to active directory, and so my laptop got added to the corporate domain. As part of the magic performed by the migration script, I got a new profile on my computer. That’s a standard part of setting up on a domain. The other half of the magic is that the new profile really just rides on top of the old one, and uses a lot of its local settings.
Ever since the migration I’ve been running into little problems that I spend hours researching with no help from Google, only to trace them back to file permission issues. Tonight, the unhappy file is the one that is responsible for telling Quicktime which file types it can play in the browser. After granting the administrators group ownership of: C:\Documents and Settings\oldprofile\Local Settings\Application Data\Apple Computer\QuickTime\QuickTime.qtp, I can finally see quicktime videos again.
All of this because I have a Blackberry which Verizon won’t let receive picture/video messages because it doesn’t have a camera (even though it has full multi-media capabilities) forcing me to check video messages online. So in this rant I blame hours of frustration on Verizon for not enabling obvious features on their phones, Windows and it’s inability to recursively set file permissions, and Apple and their Quicktime installer which uses a mysterious registry key to point to the Local Settings folder of my old profile instead of the new one. The perfect storm of crappy software. May all who helped create any of these “features” die a slow death in a house fire.