Perhaps once every six to twelve months I end up flattening my work computer and getting the IT folks to drop a fresh, clean image on it. I install, uninstall, re-install, and generally mess around with the thing, so after a time it really starts running slow and unreliably.

This time, my problem ended up being that I installed Notepad++ (which I’m not linking to so no one falls into the same hole I did). Turns out if you use the menus in Notepad++ to associated document types with it, it deletes the old document type and creates one central type in the registry that it associates with the document extension. So if you associate XML, LOG, CONFIG, and TXT with Notepad++, they all become “Notepad ++ Documents” and if you change one to do something, all of them change.

This is particularly troublesome in the case of “BAT” - batch scripts. I associated “BAT” with Notepad++ and it removed the ability to execute batch scripts because “BAT” became a “Notepad++ Document.” I futzed around with the registry and trying to recover from backup, but it was no use. Time to re-image.

I got the machine re-imaged on Friday at around 2:00p. I was up until 1:45a Saturday re-installing everything that wasn’t included in the image. After final tally, there were over 45 applications, utilities, and other tools I installed. And that didn’t count doing things like checking out the source to all the stuff I have to build.

But, hey, it’s running totally fast now. Hehehehe…