Since we don't have a forum for Windowses (and I'm not suggesting we need one, no thanks), here.

I had an intermittent problem with my SSD going offline at times. It wouldn't be visible to BIOS too, until a power down. It didn't happen often - perhaps 3-4 times in the last few months. First I wrote it off as a glitch on my aging motherboard (4 years), or perhaps a temperature issue (processor was always cool, but disks were not, so cable could move perhaps). But now with the brand new everything (except one disk and the box itself) it happened twice, and that got me into the mood to investigate. Event log got me here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2013/06/21/event-id-129-storachi-reset-to-device-device-raidport0-was-issued.aspx or, in simpler terms, the OS power options would tell the disk to go to sleep to save power, and then it couldn't find it because it was off. Or some such stupid misunderstanding between the protocol of Windowses and that of Intel (whose SSD it is).

The article says to go to power options, advanced, and turn the sleep mode for PCI Express off. Well, it was off, but I found something else mentioned in readers' comments, that the disks would be shut down after 20 minutes - well, I've now set that to never, and we'll see how that goes.

However, getting to the control panel wasn't so easy. It wouldn't work. Actually nothing involving that explorer.exe would work (except, miraculously, file open dialog in other apps), I kept getting "{26EE0668-A00A-44D7-9371-BEB064C98683} Server execution failed" after a whole minute of waiting, which might mean it was waiting for the network for something, which is weird - I don't use anything from other local machines because they are laptops or phones and mostly off. Googling that, I found http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/10524-explorer-exe-server-execution-failed.html (3rd entry has the answer).

Turns out that in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders, my Personal entry was pointing to n:\dox - a folder which now doesn't exist, it's now on q:\dox, on the new 2TB disk. I edited the entry and voila - explorer works, control panel works, individual control panel applets also work.

Wow. One folder is misplaced and what, everything crashes? No message in the way of "can't find %thisfoldername%, continuing without it" (or "...please locate it"), just the cryptic message with a bloody GUID? If I was selling an app which would refuse to work if one folder was moved, my phone would have melted already, and I'd be in a nuthouse, without customers and just a few meters of neurons left. But this is Microsoft and that's considered normal.

And, ah, BTW, I still do have an N: drive - it could have created the bloody folder, but it didn't even try.

set rant temporarily off until next