IE9 fails to install with error 3715

Having a bit of an unexplained error on a client using IE9 (don't ask) prompted me to attempt uninstalling and reinstalling it after all other attempts to diagnose the issue failed. Uninstall worked fine, but upon running the downloaded manual installer I was met with a generic error. I looked at the Microsoft troubleshooting advice which yielded no results, however on attempting to install from Windows Update I at least got an error code: 3715. A few searches yielded Technet articles like this one that mostly linked back to the same troubleshooting info.

On one of such articles I saw some advice related to clearing temporary files which didn't work but led me to start thinking about what else could be on the computer that could prevent the install. When I started IE8 for the first time after uninstalling 9 I got two popups regarding browser toolbars: Bing Bar, and Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. I decided to try uninstalling these, and sure enough after doing so the manual installer for IE9 worked flawlessly.

I'm not sure if my original problem is solved yet, but hopefully this post can help anyone else searching on this particular error, or other errors related to installing IE9.

High latency for hyper-v 2012 r2 VMs

I had just finished setting up a 5 NIC team to provide 5gbps to my shiny new Windows Server 2012 R2 Core with Hyper-V host when I discovered that the VMs had very high, and unpredictable latency. Not cool! I read a number of blog posts regarding settings of the physical NIC that could be to blame. The most common theme, as explained in this article is a feature called VM Queueing. It seems to be most common Broadcom NICs but also affects Intel. Looks easy enough to change... except in core. Luckily there are a few handy powershell cmdlets to handle this issue in Core. Confused by the exact syntax for Disable-NetAdapterVMQ, I searched google for this cmdlet and found this great blog post on the exact issue. At first I tried just disabling the VMQ on my NIC team multiplex adapter, but still had the issue. Eventually I ended up running ' Disable-NetAdapterVMQ “*” ' to disable the feature on all adapters. My VMs dropped 4 packets, but then came back up with <1ms ping. I gotta tell ya, I <3 <1ms :)

Windows Server 2012 slide login

Sick of that annoying touch-drag motion that makes sense on tablets, but not so much with a mouse that you are forced to perform before logging in to Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8? It turns out the spacebar will skip this screen. There's probably a way to disable the swipe to login on these newer versions of the operating system, but this work around seems efficient enough that I didn't bother looking for it.