I’ve had issues with a Vista machine of mine where randomly some sites will become unavailable. The only way I could get access back to the site would be to flush the DNS cache. When I would have the issues it would typically happen fairly frequently. Taking a look at the DNS cache would indicate for the sites I couldn’t open would show they had a “Server failure of Type A”.

I did a little research on this issue and came across a knowledge base article by Microsoft. The KB article (928233) says that the issue is a result in the way Vista handles the DHCP Broadcast flag in discovery packets. XP had this disabled by default while Vista does not. If the router that you are using does not support the broadcast flag it can cause corrupt DNS cache entries on your Vista machine. The solution to the problem is to disable the broadcast flag.

To disable the flag you need to use the registry editor to make changes under this subkey, where GUID corresponds to your network card:

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\
Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\{GUID}

Create a new DWORD (32-bit) Value with the name “DhcpConnEnableBcastFlagToggle” and set it’s value to “1″.

I had driver installation issues on a recently purchased Vista Desktop (Gateway GT5656). The first issue came about when I tried to attach an external SATA Hard Drive enclosure by Antec. The add hardware wizard couldn’t find an driver automatically for the device. On top of this, Antec didn’t release a driver for this enclosure because Windows should already have the driver.

The second device I had issues with was a new HP Officejet J5740. The HP installation software (already terrible software, but that’s for another day) would install the driver, but when it would go to actually connect the device it would hang infinitely. If I tried to manually install the printer drivers from the CD, the Add Hardware wizard would report it couldn’t find any drivers that would work for the device.

After some digging on the web I came across a knowledge base article (940199) at Microsoft’s website that provided a solution for both issues. Apparently Vista can have issues repairing/replacing a damaged Infcache.1 file. At the knowledge base article they provide a hotfix for the issue.

Once I installed the hotfix the printer installed without any issues. The external hard disk enclosure also worked without any issues.