A frustration that I have been having with Remote Desktop (mstsc.exe) on Windows 7 is that sometimes a window (remote session) just won’t maximize to full screen.  It will maximize, but then have scroll bars on the right and/or bottom and not the usual blue bar at the top.

To alleviate the problem I have been starting all my remote desktop sessions via Start -> Run:

mstsc /v remote.example.com /f

The “/f” at the end forces a full screen.  However I sometimes click on the “Restore Down” button by accident, instead of clicking on the “Minimize” button as intended, and try as you might, when you maximize the window, it just won’t go to full screen mode.

The solution is to press the CTRL-ALT-BREAK keys simultaneously.  This key sequence toggles between “windowed” and full screen mode.

I hope this helps you as this was really driving me up the wall!!!

I recently tried installing Dell Appassure Replay Core on a client’s server and received this error message:

Installation failed with error: 1. Bad state (invalid stored block lenghts)

At first I thought this was going to turn into a nightmare and I was about to phone Appassure support, when I Googled the error message.  I couldn’t find any information about this error pertaining to Appassure, but I did find a solution.

This seems to be a generic Windows Installer error that indicates that the installation media is corrupt.

I simply downloaded the installation files again, and hey presto it worked.

So if you get this error message I would suggest that you just try downloading the installer again.