It seems there is a little bug with the installation on Vista under certain circumstances which causes the extensions not being registered properly with OO.org.

To solve the problem, follow the same following steps:

• Locate your OO.org “install” directory of your installation, usually it is C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 3\share\extensions\install” [Updated 2008-12-21 to include "extensions", thanks to the anonymous commenter!]
• Manuylla install the appropriate dictionary extension (“dict-en.oxt”, “dict-de.oxt”, “dict-fr.oxt”, “dict-it.oxt”) by either launching the oxt directly or by chosing Tools -> Extension Manager.

For me this worked after restarting OO.org totally (i.e. closing down all Writer, Calc, …).

As the easiest workaround, you should perform the following steps:

• Once you get notified about the update and you are asked if you want to install it, say “No”.
• Close the Mozilla application in question.
• Search for the application in your “Start” menu.
• Right-click the entry and choose “Run as Administrator…”
• Choose “Check for Updates…” in the “Help” menu
• Confirm you want to install the update and walk through the update process.

The installation will now work. For security reasons you should close the application once installation is finished, because it will still be running with elevated privileges. Now start the application again normally.

The same principle works for any application that is not Vista-aware and fails on automatic update. For security reasons make sure you keep the time you run with elevated privileges as short as possible.

OpenVPN is my preferred tool for implementing low-cost VPN solutions for one reason: it simply works. It works very well on Linux and Windows. On Windows I commonly use one of the GUI frontends. On Windows, OpenVPN uses a virtual network card for the tunnelled data, the TAP Win32 Adapter, currently in version 8. Unfortunately this driver has a issue at the moment: the adapter works only once, after restarting windows the device has to be deactivated and reactivated, otherwise it will not come up after the connection to the VPN server has been established.

To get around this anoying issue I wanted to write a script that will reactivate before starting the GUI. As I soon found out, there is no way in standard Windows XP to (de)activate a device from a script. After some time I found a tool in Microsoft’s DDK which can also be downloaded seperately: devcon, a command line tool by Microsoft as an alternative to the Windows Device Manager.

First I needed to find the hardware id of the TAP device I wanted to restart:

> devcon findall *TAP*
ISAPNP\READDATAPORT\0 : ISAPnP-Datenleseport
ROOT\NET\0000 : TAP-Win32 Adapter V8
2 matching device(s) found.

Clearly I am interested in ROOT\NET\0000 in my case. This device can now be (de)activated with “devcon deactivate @ROOT\NET\0000” resp. “devcon activate @ROOT\NET\0000“. The @-sign is important!

As I wanted to explore some alternatives to Microsoft’s shell scripts (.cmd), I discovered KiXtart, a very powerful shell scripting language for Windows. Main advantage is, that KiXtart is able to run the script without showing an anyoing shell window during its runtime (which is the whole VPN connection in my case, as I want to disable the device after OpenVPN is shut down.

The script that needs to be executed is trivial: Instead of launching OpenVPN-GUI directly, I now launch the following KiXtart script from any shortcuts to OpenVPN GUI:

shell "devcon disable @@root\net\0000"
shell "devcon enable @@root\net\0000"
shell "C:\Program Files\OpenVPN\bin\openvpn-gui.exe"
shell "devcon disable @@root\net\0000"

The KiXtart interpreter requries around 1.4MB of RAM during the session (which I accept and don’t care about as my machine has 1.5GB of RAM installed). If you want to spare this amount and you don’t care that the device is not deactivated right after exiting OpenVPN-GUI, you could adapt the script to execute the GUI without waiting for its termination. You’d also have to remove the last line of the script. In this case you can also simply use standard Windows shell commands, as the shell will immideatly close after calling “start C:\...\openvpn-gui.exe“.