When it comes to webservers, my favorite is Apache. Today, however, I needed to install Microsoft’s IIS on my Windows 7 notebook for a bunch of compatibility tests of some Python web applications I wrote.

Installing IIS on Windows 7 is normally a very painless task. You just go to “Start > Control Panel > Programs” and select “Turn Windows features on or off” from the dialog box that opens. Thereafter you simply select IIS and the additional components you’d like to install. After a few moments IIS is installed and ready to use.

But today, once more, Windows did its best to cod me…

After clicking “Turn Windows features on or off” the upcoming dialog box, that should list these features, was empty. No matter how often I re-opened the dialog, it remained empty and it turned out to be a pretty stubborn problem.

I tried:

• Reboot the computer
• sfc /scannow
• Return to a system restore point created a few days ago

None of these steps helped, the list of components remained empty.

After some research on the web, it turned out that this problem has been around since quite a while and both, Windows 7 and Windows Vista, are affected. Microsoft has described the effects in its knowledge base article 934538 but the steps described there didn’t help to fix the problem. Many desperate users seemed to have reinstalled their systems because they didn’t find a solution for this issue.

Fortunately I came across a comment, which led me to this Knowledge base article, which – at a first glance – has nothing to do with this problem. However, after installing the described “System Update Readiness Tool” for my version of Windows (in this case Windows 7 x64), the problem was fixed and the list of components was properly populated.

I haven’t investigated this whole issue any further, since I had to get back to my actual task. But I thought I leave a few words about it here, just in case…

As in previous versions of Microsoft Office, there’s an option in Office 2007 that turns on additional feedback sounds. The additional sounds needed for this feature to be activated, can be downloaded from this page at Microsoft's website.

Unfortunately the installer insists on having an older version of Microsoft Office installed and refuses to work if you have Office 2007. But there’s a rather simple solution to get it installed anyway. Here’s how:

1. Download the file sounds.exe from the web page above
2. Open an execute dialog by pressing the keys WIN + R or by selecting “Execute” from the Windows Start Menu.
3. Enter this command (note that c:\download in this example has to be replaced with the path where you stored the downloaded file):
   c:\download\sounds.exe /t:c:\officesounds /c
   This will unpack the installation files and store them in C:\officesounds
4. Go to the newly created folder C:\officesounds, execute sounds.msi and follow the instructions of the installer.

All what’s left to do is to turn on the sound feedback in one of your office programs. For example, in Microsoft Word you would click the Office-Button, then "Options" and "Extended", scroll down almost to the end of the dialog and turn on the option "Provide sound feedback".

Enjoy :-)