1081 Case of the Broken Hearts

Got a call from a client in Latham NY 12110 complaining that she wasn't able to play her favorite game of Hearts on the MSN Gaming Zone today. I had been able to cure that in the past for her so she asked me to log in remotely and take a quick look.

Checking my notes from the last time she couldn't play I say a Java update had done the trick so off to Java land we surfed. Confident that this would do the trick I coached her through the finer points of the update and how to avoid accepting anything extra, like the Sun Download manager, along the way. Soon we had the update cleanly installed, rebooted the computer and were eagerly loading the game.

Bonk! “No go,” she said, “still can't past that certain point”.

I checked here screen and found a message from MSN indicating that there was a problem with her ports. (http://zone.msn.com/en/support/article/support3215.htm) So, I followed the link to see what it said. It was an interesting expose of what ports might be needed to do what but the only thing standing between this machine and the WWW was a free copy of Zone Alarm. Even with that disabled we still weren't playing nice. That ports ploy turned out to be a real red herring.

“Leave the machine on,” I told her, “I need to poke around a bit more.” As the afternoon progressed I ran C-cleaner, re-did her Flash, updated the Windows (all except for Service Pack 3 – which she promised to let me do real soon – and a couple of HP updates which I have learned never to trust) , installed the latest version of Firefox, updated its plug-ins and re-set Internet Explorer.

Later that day, when we got together to try it, we seemed to be off to a rough start. Something called “BoontyBox”, had error because “No compatible partner file is available”. Could this be why her Hearts were broken? I had to know, so I asked.

“No”, she assured me, “that error has been coming up ever since I let the Dell Technician try to quicken my startup by removing some programs.” A quick check of msconfig, a fast trip to the startup folder and the Boonty error was no more.

Pressing on to MSN Games she fired up Hearts once more. BONK. An activeX control needed to be installed. Try again. BONK. Another activeX control has to be setup. BONK, BONK, BONK, we bonked along through what seemed to be a dozen more activeX controls and......

Yahoo! It worked.

Before I left I urged her to check out Pogo because it is always nice to have someone to turn to when MSN and activeX breaks your Hearts.