Okay, this is more for my benefit than anyone elses as I keep forgetting it. If you use the rich text or “Visual Editor” when creating Wordpress posts you can press “ALT+V” to display a second bar containing more advanced editing functions like underline, text colour, undo/redo and my favourite — clean up Word HTML when pasted into a post.

According to Engtech, if “ALT+V” doesn’t work for you then you can try using “ALT+SHIFT+V” to bring it up. Engtech also give a nice rundown on all the features this advanced bar contains so head over to their site if you want a better description.

For those of you not currently using the rich text editor who would like to check it out, it can be enabled by going to “Users” then “Your Profile” in your Wordpress admin area, and then checking the “Use visual editor when writing” box at the top of the page.

Shortly after installing Windows Vista I went on an updating spree and updated all my device drivers and firmware to their most current versions. This included updating my Netgear DG834 v2 ADSL Modem/Router to version 3.01.32.

Somehow doing this ended up stopping Windows Live Messenger 8.1 from being able to login.

A lot of searching revealed that there are some known issues between Windows Vista and certain Routers. This has something to do with the way in which Windows Vista’s new networking stack can tune itself for the best performance. You can read more about the auto-tuning feature in this column on Microsoft’s website.

The easiest and best solution I found was to downgrade my router’s firmware back to version 3.01.25. I have been running this version successfully with no network issues at all for weeks now.

You can find Netgear firmware downloads at http://kbserver.netgear.com/downloads_support.asp. Consult your router’s manual for installation instructions.

If this doesn’t work for you, you’re already using that firmware, or you have a different model router, then you can try disabling the “Autotuning” feature:

1. Click Start and type “cmd” into the Quick Search box.
2. Right-click the “cmd” item that appears and select “Run as administrator” (Or hit ctrl+shift+enter). Click “Continue” in the resulting UAC dialog and a Command Prompt window will open.
3. In this window type the following string:
   netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
   and hit enter. The prompt will return “Ok.” If successful.
4. Close the command prompt by typing “exit” then enter, or by clicking the close button in the top right corner.
5. Reboot your computer.

I found that disabling auto-tuning worked great for restoring Windows Live Messenger functionality but I was still experiencing some random network issues. Try the router firmware option first if you’re able to.

If you’re using a “current model” ADSL Modem/Router then continue to keep an eye on the manufacturer’s site for an updated, Windows Vista compatible firmware version.

This small add-on for Internet Explorer published by IEForge replaces the standard “Find on Page” dialog box with a bar that appears at the bottom of the page instead similar to the one in FireFox.

It has a few extra features compared to the default find box like searching as you type and an option to highlight all occurrences of your search term on the page at the same time. The box will also turn red as you type if the term you enter doesn’t exist in the page which is nice.

The best feature of it though in my opinion is that it stays out of the way of the content of the page you’re searching on, unlike the default box that you need to drag all over the place to look behind it.

You can download it from IEForge’s site.

For some seemingly unknown reason tonight my copy of iTunes decided to start displaying the following “Saving iTunes Library” dialog whenever I quit the application.

The dialog would only be there for a few seconds but would make my PC completely unresponsive while it did its thing.

I remembered I had experienced this issue before but couldn’t find the site I’d originally found the solution on. A lot of searching later I found this thread on iLounge containing the solution — Exclude your iTunes folder from your Antivirus program’s active scanning.

I realised after this that I had just done a fresh reinstall of my antivirus program, NOD32, to fix another issue and in doing this had cleared out all my previous settings. Adding my iTunes folder to its exclusions list again worked a treat.