For those of you that have ever tried finding anything on HP’s homepage you know that it can be virtually impossible 
thus I am often struggling to find the download link for “HP ProLiant Support Pack for Microsoft Windows Server 2003″, well no more my friends 
here is the link to use
And as a bonuslink, here is how to install it on a “Server Core” (the one without the Win GUI)..
So if you want to be totally up-beat or perhaps are testing out Boxee then you will want to install the latest Adobe Flash Player (Boxee actually seem to require this), but no worries you can get it right here;
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html
Among other things this version will add HW acceleration, neat for Netbooks as compatible GFX cards now can assist in playing video and thus perhaps adding HD playback to your otherwise slow Atom processor (however this DO require a compatible GFX card to work like the Nvidia ION and others).
So you would like to extract some files from an Install Shield (IS) installer package you have, you may as I just need a few driver files from a package.
Well first you try the extract command from Windows (as some of the Install Shield files come as .cab files) however you quickly discover that the IS.cab files are not compatible with the Windows .cab files. WinRar is often good at extracting all sorts of files, but not the IS files. You can forget all about -e or -x for extract that does not work either.
But there is a way, you need an utility called “ISCabVu.exe”, sadly this utility is not just lying around on the net, so you need to do a bit of fiddling around to get hold of it..
1. Download an evaluation copy of Install Shield (any never version will likely do, do go for the latest).
2. Install it (if you don’t want to pollute your system use SandboxIE (requires 32bit os)).
3. Copy the files under “Program Files\InstallShield\2010\System” to a different location.
4. Now just run the “ISCabVu.exe” file.
5. You may be able to thin out this directory (150mb) but this may take some time and may not be worth your time.
Now the extract part is easy, see image below;
I spend some time on this before cracking the nut, so I thought I’d share with you all in case you ever experienced something similar.
See I was hardware certifying a HP 6930p laptop for SCCM and things was fine until my attention moved to installing the “HP Quicklaunch buttons”, my first issue was that even though I extracted the installed drivers using Driver Magician or Driver Max it did not work – both programs failed to extract the certificate for the drivers thus you would have a ‘drivers not certified’ warning when installing them, well I decided to simply install the HP package with the -s switch and here things became really annoying – the installation proceeded fine and in device manager we moved from “Unknown device” to “HP Quicklaunch Buttons” but accompanied by the text “Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)” and no amount of reboots fixed this. I tried with numerous versions of the install package, just in case it was some issue with a specific version of the package – but all had the same result.
A lot of googling led me to this article where a guy named Eric has a very similar issue, he has detected a common denomitor namely virtualization. Eric has discovered that if he deploy a workstation using a wim image captured on a VmWare workstation and then later try to install “HP Quick Launch Buttons” he gets this issue with the ‘corrupted or missing drivers’, but if he manually installs the same machine then there is no issue.
The solution is simple, all that is missing to make things work is three files;
hidclass.sys
hidparse.sys
hidusb.sys
these files need to be copied to “C:\windows\system32\drivers” (or the equivalent on your system), and after a reboot the “HP Quick Launch Buttons” is now working fine.. But where do you get these files from? You can of cause get them from a different system (copy them to a usb pen or what ever), but there is another easy way around this – see these three files are all related to “Human Interface Devices” and all you need to do to have them installed (copied to c:\windows\system32\drivers) is to insert an external usb mouse or keyboard (this will launch an automated installation of these three files). Now where inserting a USB mouse or keyboard may work for a single user it’s not really appropriate for corporate installation environments, so in our corporate setup we will be copying these three files into the C:\windows\system32\drivers folder during installation - having them there will do no harm.
So you upgraded to Windows 7 but are as always having issues with Codec’s (A codec is the ‘decoder/encoder’ for a video or soundfile in a specific format eg. DivX or Xvid).
Under Windows Vista the Vista Codec pack seemed to work perfectly, but I was reluctant to install it on Windows 7 out of fear to create problems for H.264 (H.264 is now native to Windows 7, which was not the case for Windows Vista). However in the end I had to (too many things did not work without these codec’s), anyway it turned out that the Vista Codec Pack would not install on Windows 7, it cleverly detected that it was a new OS and pointed out that a new package was available here.
So all in all, my worries was laid to rest and I downloaded Windows 7 codec pack and everything was back to the old working state.
Do you need this codec pack? Well very likely not, most users can download the VLC player this player has build in most common codec’s and can thus play most video/snd files you get hold of, however if you need to do video conversion etc. then it is a different matter, Windows then need to be able to ‘understand’ the fileformat and this may ofthen require a codec. The rule should be, try VLC player, if its enough dont install anything more if not install the Windows 7 codec pack or Windows Vista Codec pack (also works for Windows XP).
So yesterday I had a go on restoring a dead printer spooler service, a user had tried installing a HP printer using the installation wizard on the CD and something went terribly wrong and crashed the service.
The service would start but would quickly come to a halt displaying a DEP warning and you would never get anywhere near the printers.
I tried reinstalling Windows Server 2003 SP2 in the hope that any corrupted DLL’s etc would be refurbished but to no avail, in hindsight I should have tried SFC.EXE /Scannow (checks vital Windows files) but hindsight is often way too easy 
There was no HP Jetdirect or other suspect things to uninstall.
Then I moved to restore the printers using PrintMig (we do have backups handy for just such occations see http://www.kanmandet.dk/?p=256) however as the Spooler service was not running this was impossible.
Then the time came to cleanspl.exe from the resource kit for Windows 2003 server, this was a partly success as it actually enabled the service to start – great – but as I just had clicked ‘yes’ to everything even the regular TCP/IP printing was disabled as well as ALL printers (the latter was to be expected as that is what cleanspl.exe does), ok so I tried again restoring the printers backed up with PrintMig and the problems was back the service once again could not start.
Examination of the eventlogs and the registry let me to believe that the culprit was the “HP Standard TCP/IP port” monitor, so after making an export of the registry, I moved to delete ALL but the LPR, Standard TCP/IP Port, USB monitor and local Port under the registry key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlPrintMonitors”, and sure enough now the spooler service again was up and running. Now I reverted to the exported registry and then repeated the process just removing one monitor at the time, and viola once the “HP Standard TCP/IP port” was gone the service worked fine.
So here are my suggestions if you ever run into a similar problem;
1. Before this ever happens make a backup of your printers using PrintMig
2. Run SFC.EXE /Scannow just to be sure no important windows files are corrupted.
3. Check the eventlog see if you can find any references to a “monitor” name (from the; “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlPrintMonitors” registry key).
4. Make an export of the registry branch;
“HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlPrintMonitors”,
5. Try to delete one sub-branch of the;
“HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlPrintMonitors”,
branch at a time, after each delete try to start the spooler service.
A tip to prevent things like this to happen is to avoid all custom “monitors” (specially installed printer management software and ports), use regular TCP/IP and LPR ports whenever possible, sure it’s easier to install using some HP installation wizard but it is often not necessary and your windows installation will love you for not installing all that ‘crap’.
Some helpful links;
http://members.shaw.ca/bsanders/CleanPrinterDrivers.htm
http://www.windowsreference.com/windows-xp/how-to-clean-print-spooler-in-windows-xp2003/
http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/thread-3490411.php
