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Return to wireless Hell: the computer which Knows Best!

I return from my week-long break to my PC with a sense of dread. It takes advantage of my absence, it seems, to learn new Bad Tricks.

About the first thing I notice is the new advert for Vista from BlimpTV. No, that's the second thing; first was the failure of my wireless "Windows Zero Config" software which decided to hand control of the wireless adapter back to Linksys's own device manager. That (very simply) doesn't work.

Sorted that out. Found my automatic script has filled the disk, and it needs purging. Easy: masses of digital video source clip material can go, as soon as I edit it into a single movie. Except, the PC which runs the movie editor (Windows Movie Creator) is a remote PC which I access through the remote display protocol (RDP) and it won't run Windows Movie Creator.

Actually, it will run it. It just won't start it. If I go to the Terminal Server machine, and start it locally, it starts just fine, and it runs just fine over RDP; but in their wisdom, the gurus of Redmond have decreed that you can't do that (same for Task Manager, by the way, which makes it impossible to terminate a crashed application over RDP unless you make the journey to the server).

No reason. They know better than Us.

Of course, there's Windows Mobile, which I quite like. I've decided to back up my Outlook diary and contacts to Yahoo, so I can access it from anywhere in the world. Of course, you can also back this Outlook data up to your Windows Mobile phone. But, it turns out, you can't back up Yahoo to the mobile phone. It has been determined that you don't want to do that.

And then I start up Windows Internet Explorer. It's set to go straight to a favourite web site (newswireless.net, duh!) on startup. Being in a hurry, I clicked on "favourites" and selected a different site.

IE7 simply ignores me, and carries on opening up the default startup. That advert isn't as much of a spoof as it thinks...