I ran into a strange issue the other day and thought I would share the solution. I had a laptop with Windows 7, and occasionally after shutting it down, everything would look like it was off, but the laptop stayed hot and the CPU fan would continue to run until the battery died.

I managed to duplicate the issue on another laptop, also running Windows 7. What was also interesting is that both laptops were configured with BitLocker for full disk encryption.

After some searching, I came across a Microsoft hotfix that resolves that specific issue on Windows 7 computers running BitLocker. Microsoft doesn’t include a cause in the information for the hotfix, so I have no idea what the actual issue is, but at least there’s an easy fix for it.

The hotfix is provided in article ID 975496 and can be found at the link below:

• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975496

Where has this been all my life? I can’t count the number of times I’ve needed to uninstall something that won’t allow a computer to boot normally, yet in Safe Mode I can’t uninstall it because the program uses the Windows Installer service which by default won’t run in Safe Mode. I finally got around to looking into it and now I can uninstall anything in Safe Mode to my heart’s content.

For those wishing to enable the Windows Installer service in Safe Mode, add the following registry keys and set their Default value to ‘Service’. The first key is for plain Safe Mode, the second key is for Safe Mode with Networking.

• HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SafeBoot\Minimal\MSIServer
• HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SafeBoot\Network\MSIServer

The screenshot below shows what this should look like in regedit.

• net start msiserver

You should now be able to run any installer or uninstaller that uses the Windows Installer service in Safe Mode.