Special character in user name causing problems

[IslandBoy77]

Hi

I'm working a friend's PC, and their username / account name on Vista is "Fred & Wilma". Since their account name, including on the hard drive, has the & symbol in it, wsus won't run (it throws out the error message "path may not be more than a 128 characters long and must not contain any of the following characters #$&*@." Is there a work-around for this? Changing the account name is a no-go, as they have a lot of software already installed, and creating a new user account / transferring all the settings etc from the current account is just going to be too hard / too much work.

Any ideas?

Thanks
Peter

[aker]

Then you should change the TEMP Path:

1. create a directory, which should be used as the new TEMP-Path
2. allow the user to read and write to this directory
3. (the following steps could be different / or just google "change temp path" or something like that) do a right click on "computer" from the start menu
4. on one of the tabs, there is a button called "environment vars" (or sth. similar); click it
5. there are two parts of the window (user-wide vars and system-wide vars); you need to change the user-vars "TMP" and "TEMP" to your newly created directory (e.g. "C:\temp"; important: no backslash at the end)

Then try it again

[IslandBoy77]

That worked perfectly: thanks. I then had to battle the dreaded "Can't determine OS properties" error, but, FYI to those reading this, that problem is most often caused by Avast not cleaning up after it's been uninstalled on Vista, and having to edit the InprocServer32 key of the following 3 vbscript entries: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{B54F3741-..., HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{B54F3742-... and HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{B54F3743-... It appears that Avast takes over the (Default) key and generates a new value for vbscript.dll (called Default Engine), so one has to change the contents of the (Default) value to C:\windows\system32\vbscript.dll and delete the superfluous Default Engine value generated by Avast. In the end, there should only be 2 values in each of the InprocServer32 sub key folders: (Default) & ThreadingModel