Q. I need your help. I am new to the computer and I lost the printer icon in the lower-right corner of the screen. How do I re-create it? I used it to check my ink supply.
Charles Petruzzi@aol.com
A. While Windows users either love or hate having that taskbar full of icons displayed in the lower right just next to the clock, few have been told how to make them go away–or reappear. So let’s start there, Mr. P.
Right-click on the Start button and select Properties to bring up a tabbed menu with settings for both the Start Menu and the Taskbar. Select the Taskbar tab. Click on the small button for Customize at the bottom of the menu that appears. Here you will find lists of all items currently available for the Taskbar and for items that once were there but now have been deactivated.
If you look closely you will see that pressing the left mouse button while hovering over any item brings up an option bar that lets you hide an item when it is inactive or to always show it or to always hide it.
You almost certainly will find your printer there. So press the left mouse on the printer’s entry and change the setting to Always Show, and you’ll be back in business.
This is true assuming that the original software for your printer registered it to appear in that taskbar.
Or you can fix things by adding an icon for your printer on the Quick Launch bar that is displayed on the far left of the screen next to the Start button rather than in the Taskbar on the far right.
Click on Start and then Control Panel; find the Printer Control Panel and click it open. Give a right-click on the icon for your printer and select Create Shortcut from the menu that appears. This will place a shortcut on the desktop that can be clicked to call up the printer settings whenever desired.
If you have the Quick Launch toolbar activated, you can drag the icon down onto the bar next to Start and a tiny icon will appear there. If you don’t have Quick Launch active, just right-click in the blue bar next to the Start button and select Toolbars from the pop-up menu that appears. There will be a listing for Quick Launch.
Whether you tilt to the right or to the left, you have one-click access to that handy icon to check the printer status even when no print job is running.
Q. I’m losing hair that I cannot afford to lose over the ubiquitous “Always trust content from Macromedia Inc.” message that pops up on a lot of Web sites that use Macromedia Flash to create animations. As soon as I say yes so I can use one of my favorite sites, I am bombarded with obnoxious animation at other sites.
My present solution is to uninstall Macromedia Flash Player each time I am forced to trust it. Is there a better way, short of purchasing a pop-up blocker that would kill the animation, assuming it has an override feature for specified sites?
Bill O’Loughlin@prodigy.net
A. Don’t touch your wallet, Mr. O., just fire up that browser and log on to the Macromedia-free confines of http://toolbar.google.com.
There you will be able to download one of the Web’s best pop-up stoppers for free along with Google’s software to place its own search window in your browser’s toolbar.
Thousands, if not millions, of folks have found that the Google Toolbar service lets them take full advantage of Macromedia’s great animation displays when they are desired while keeping uninvited animations from flashing across the screen.
Macromedia’s animation software, called Flash, is becoming nearly as ubiquitous as Adobe’s Acrobat Reader, and few of us relish the bother to keep installing either one of them on an as-needed basis.
I should add that another free pop-up blocker comes when users upgrade to Windows XP Service Pack 2. Also, Yahoo (http://toolbar.yahoo.com), the Microsoft Network (http://toolbar.msn.com) and America Online (http://toolbar.aol.com) offer similar free pop-up blockers, plus a box for their own search engines.
One can debate about which of these search engines is the most desirable, but everybody should agree that all of them do a great job blocking pop-ups.
Q. I accidentally removed Microsoft Office Standard Edition 2003 from my computer. Now I have lost all access to Microsoft Works. I can open it but when I try to use it or open a document, I get a message that the ordinal 309 could not be located in the dynamic link library ltkrn13n.dll.
I have tried to restore my computer back to the time it was removed without success. I don’t know what an ordinal 309 is or how to reinstall Microsoft Works.
Pat Graves @PeoplePC.com
A. You have been drafted into a club nobody should belong to, P.G. Bear with me as I outline possible fixes.
This problem surfaces when one removes Microsoft Office from a computer that also has the similar but much less powerful Microsoft Works application suite. That message about ordinal 309 is trying to tell you that the Office uninstallation removed ltkrn13n.dll, which is a support file also used by Works.
There are two fixes and neither is pretty. If you are willing to reinstall Office 2003 you will be able to use Microsoft Word to open your Works files, which have the extension of WPS rather than the DOC used by Office. That will salvage your data but force you to use Office instead of Works.
The other fix is to find a copy of the ltkrn13n.dll support file and paste it in the Windows/System32 directory and the directory used by Microsoft Works. Chances are you have another copy of the DLL file on your computer because other software uses it also.
To find out, click on Start and select Search and type in the search term ltkrn13n.dll. If you find it, which you probably will, then just select it with the mouse and press Control + C to copy it into memory.
Then right-click on Start, select Explore and use the Windows Explorer software to point to the Windows/System32 folder. Click the mouse inside that folder and press Control + V to paste the file there. Now use Explorer and point to Documents and Settings, and then Programs and then Microsoft Works. Click inside the Microsoft Works folder and use the Control + V command to paste the missing file back where it needs to be.
If you cannot find the ltkrn13n.dll file on your computer you can use one of the many ad-supported but otherwise free Web sites that supply these kinds of files, such as www.dlldump.com.
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Contact Jim Coates via e-mail at jcoates@tribune.com or via snail mail at the Chicago Tribune, Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago IL 60611. Questions can be answered only through this column. Add your point of view at chicagotribune.com/askjim.
