Can I 'autoclick' a window? (Getting around an OE6 bug by hacking the register)

Factual Questions
1

Outlook Express 5 used to remember what folder you had saved your attachments to and this would be the default for next time. I rather liked this.

OE6 has a bug which prevents this from working correctly. When it saves the folder path name in the registry it drops the last letter of the path and so, the next time around it finds an invalid path and it defaults to “my documents”. I hate this.

A patch was issued by Microsoft which was supposed to correct this bug but the patch has a bug of its own and the correction does not work. Cite: http://insideoe.tomsterdam.com/

Looking in the registry I found in the branch
[HKEY_USERS.DEFAULT\Identities
{68BB60E0-7A93-11D6-8FEC-C8E432BD9143}
\Software\Microsoft\Outlook Express\5.0]

the key named “Save Attachment Path” which is where OE saves the path and, sure enough, OE drops the last character each time.

I want to save to the desktop by default. I have been experimenting and found that if I add blank spaces to the end of the path name in OE thus “C:\WINDOWS\Desktop__________” (underscore=space) these blank spaces at the end do not interfere with the saving correctly to the desktop and one of them is dropped with each saving so everything would work until all the spaces at the end have been dropped.

So, the idea is that every time I start the computer a batch file or .REG file would add 40 or 50 spaces at the end and that should be enough for one session. I have put the following .REG file in the startup folder and it does what I want it to do:


REGEDIT4

[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Identities\
 {68BB60E0-7A93-11D6-8FEC-C8E432BD9143}
 \Software\Microsoft\Outlook Express\5.0]

"Save Attachment Path"="C:\\WINDOWS\\Desktop     "

I have only put a few spaces here but in the original I have something like 50 and everything works fine. . . except: when the reg file runs at startup I get two messages. The first one is something like “are you absolutely sure that you want to add this information to the register in spite of the fact that we have told you a million times not to mess with the register and that your computer may implode or explode or both?” when I click on “yes” then I get another message saying something like “registry successfully modified” which I then have to click on to close.

Now, I want to modify this registry key at startup but I do not want to have to deal with these stupid messages. Is there a way of cancelling them somehow? Maybe running the .REG from a batch file with some switch to cancel the messages? Or maybe there is another way to change this key directly in the registry?

2

Yes, you can run REGEDIT from a batch file and suppress the confirmation boxes.

Put a line like this in your batch file:


regedit /s *c:\pathname\for	he\importfilename.reg*
3

Thanks neutron star, I managed to get it going although it was a tad more complicated. I had to create the batch file as you said but putting it directly in the startup file still created a DOS window so the way I have it is that in the startup folder I have a shortcut to the BAT file which runs the REG file. That does the trick.

By the way and while I have your attention: I am still messing with video files and I have a problem I do not understand with TMPGEnc. Suppose I take a video file and I use tmpgenc to create an MPG file. Suppose I choose 500 Kbits/sec for video and 96 Kbits/sec for audio (just as an example, the numbers are not critical). Then if I create a video-only file, I get a file size which roughly jibes with the rate I set (say 5 MB). Suppose I choose audio only. Then I get an audio file size which makes sense (say 1 MB in this example). Now, if I choose to generate a combined audio+video file with the same parameters I would expect it to be about 6 MB but instead it goes to 4 or 5 times as large and I do not know why. I have a suspicion maybe it is not compressing the audio or something like that. Do you have any idea? Am I doing something wrong?

4

TMPGenc might be restricting you to a compliant VCD. To unlock it, click the Load button and load the unlock.mcf template.

You could also try using TMPGenc’s MPEG Tools to multiplex the audio and video streams together and see what you come up with. bbMPEG is another good tool for multiplexing - it does a better job of it than TMPGenc.