Office error 0xc0000142 (updating, please wait)

 I've run into Office 2016 failing to launch where a windows shows up which says "Updating, please wait", followed by the application (Excel, Word, etc) crashing with the above error.

The solution is to restart the 'ClickToRunSvc' service in Task Manager (under the services tab).

Corrupted certificate store in Firefox

Browsers usually demand adding an exeption for self-signed certificates, an update to Firefox recently broke this functionality. The solution is to remove the certificate store which forces FF to regenerate it at launch:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-does-your-connection-is-not-secure-mean#w_corrupted-certificate-store

Accessing Windows shares

I've come across problems accessing Windows shares, specifically, where \\server\share doesn't work but \\ip\share does. I resolved this through SFC (see previous blog post), but deleting the CSC cache is also often suggested, as per:

https://superuser.com/questions/384981/can-access-windows-share-by-ip-or-fqdn-address-but-not-by-hostname/

Run SFC on external (or other) drive

Useful info on running SFC on an external (or second installed) drive:

https://www.ghacks.net/2017/05/21/run-sfc-scannow-on-external-drives/

sfc /scannow /offwindir=d:\windows /offbootdir=d:\

 

Proxy script for blocking websites

This proxy script can be used in Windows to either block individual websites (blacklisting) or allow only specific websites (whitelisting), this example is for whitelisting:

function FindProxyForURL(url, host) {
 // Bypass the proxy for *.blogger.com
 if (dnsDomainIs(host, ".blogger.com")) {
               return "DIRECT";
 }
 return "PROXY http://127.0.0.1:18080";
 } // End of function

This is saved as a .pac file. In Control Panel, in the Internet Options, find the Connections tab, LAN settings. Uncheck “Automatically Detect Settings”. Click to check the box named “Use automatic configuration script”.

In the address field, type the location of .pac file as the following:

File://C:/Path/script.pac

More here.