Jeff Wouters's Blog

When you’re implementing a KMS infrastructure in your Windows 7 environment, it is possible you get an “Unable to connect to the WMI service on the remote machine” when you are using the Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT) to update clients with the correct license keys.

After some searching, I found multiple causes, such as firewall settings (Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) needs to be allowed through the firewalls in the clients) and port 1688 (default KMS port) needs to be allowed on the KMS host.

Still, I received the previous mentioned error…

The solution was to be found in the Windows DCOM security settings.
These are the actions you need to take to resolve this issue on your Windows 7 clients:

• Start “dcomcnfg.exe”.
• Goto “Component Services” –> “Computers”.
• Right click on “My Computer” and select “Properties”.
• Goto the tab “COM Security”.
• Click on “Edit Limits” under “Launch and Activation Permissions”.
• Select “Everyone”.
• Make sure that “Allow” is enabled for “Local Launch”, “Remote Launch”, “Local Activation” and “Remote Activation”.
  Note: By default “Local Launch” and “Local Activation” are already enabled.

Last week I’ve posted (in Dutch!) on the IT Professional Community Blog from Microsoft about creating custom libraries in Windows 7.
In that post I wrote about the possibilities for creating custom libraries in Windows 7, but this was not a “manual”.
After some requests, I started writing this post… there seems to be a lot of IT Pro’s out there that want to accomplish this so I’ve made a little manual on howto create and deploy custom libraries in your environment.

Creating the custom library

• Log on the Windows 7 VM with credentials which has access to the locations you wish to add to the libraries.
• Open Windows Explorer.
• In the right pane, right click on a white part of the screen.
• Select New -> Library.

• Fill in the name for the Library.

• Right click on the library and select Properties.
• Add the locations you desire to add to this library.
• Select the location you desire to set as the default location to save data to and click on “Set save location” to configure this.
• Select what you want to optimize this library for.
• Press OK.

• Goto %appdata%\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Libraries
• Edit the file of your library with Notepad.

Under the line “<isLibraryPinned>true</isLibraryPinned>”, add the following line:
<iconReference>shell32.dll,96</iconReference>
Here you can specify a file with the icon you desire to represent this library.

Prepare the custom library for deployment

• Goto %appdata%\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Libraries
• Copy the file from the library you have just created to a location accessible from the network.

Deploy the custom library

• Edit a user Group Policy.
• Goto User Configuration -> Policies -> Windows Settings -> Scripts (Logon/Logoff) -> Logon.
• Add a logon script which copies the library file from the network share to %appdata%\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Libraries

Script example:
copy \\domain\netlogon\Library name*.* %appdata%\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Libraries