Force Internet Explorer compatibility view to be used for your web site

With Internet Explorer 8 and 9 you may have noticed some websites not working like they used to. It's been quite a while since the release of IE 8 so most of the major sites have probably caught up to this problem, but the easy fix is to setup the site to force IE8 and IE9 to use the compatibility view function with your site. You can do this through the use of a custom header, which is easy to setup in IIS. You can do it on other types of web servers too. The custom HTTP header to add is X-UA-Compatible: IE=EmulateIE7. This is supposed to only be acknowledged by IE, thus leaving any other browser functioning as it normally would. For instructions on how to do this in IIS 6 or IIS 7 or in a Web.config file, check out the Microsoft article here. For an Apache web server you can modify the httpd.conf file or include it in specific directories or pages. Microsoft outlines this process as well in a separate article that you can find here.

Can't uninstall McAfee Agent error 1714 or 1610

The environment I manage uses McAfee EPO for its antivirus needs, and I ran across multiple events in the application log with ID 11714 and 1002 on one of the machines. The event description was "Product: McAfee Agent -- Error 1714. The older version of McAfee Agent cannot be removed. Contact your technical support group. System Error 1610." I tried to manually uninstall the Agent and it kept asking for the MFEAgent.msi installer file, but that file was already in the location it was looking in. This meant the something was corrupt, so a little digging through the McAfee support forums led me to a quick fix using a registry hack.

1. Open up the Registry Editor (regedit.exe)

2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Installer\Products
3. Go to Edit->Find
4. Search for MFEAgent.msi
5. Delete the PackageName entry that is found with MFEAgent.msi as its value. It should be under something like HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Installer\Products\2C12BAA2ADC498140ACEE56D6611F348\SourceList. The 2C12BAA2ADC498140ACEE56D6611F348 may vary between machines though, which is why you should search for it
6. Restart your computer
7. Reinstall the McAfee Agent

An alternative to searching in steps 3 and 4 would be to look in the Application event log at your event ID 1002. This will give you the exact registry path to the PackageName key you need to delete.

The McAfee forum post can be found here. Look on the second page for an entry by user SeaCat, who posted a long list of steps to fix the problem. Luckily, the first step of editing the registry was all that I needed to do, and from some of the other entries it looks like that also worked for some others.