Statistically, I didn’t think this was possible. First I get the defective Shuttle SD39P2 sent to me, then the video card I ordered wouldn’t fit in said Shuttle, and when I tried it in my full-sized PC it turned out to be defective. A new SD39P2 arrived last week, so last night I sat down to put it all together - I breathed a sigh of relief when it actually booted! So imagine the frustration I felt when the Vista installation went screwy - it would get to the stage when it copied files over and expanded them, but at the expansion stage it would stick at 0% and the optical drive (a Plextor 760A) would make these rapid-fire seeking sounds. I tried four times, and it never worked. I swapped in a cheap NEC DVD burned I picked up to keep as a spare burned, and it worked like a charm. So for those keeping score this ONE project of mine has had THREE defective parts. What are the odds? Am I cursed, or have quality control standards slipped badly on PC hardware?

On the plus side, the new Shuttle SD39P2 screams with the Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme in it. It’s so fast it hurts. But it’s a good hurt. I’ll be writing an article on this rig for Digital Media Thoughts, so watch for it.

Another one-hit-wonder just for the search engines and people who happen to have the same problem as I did.

Somehow I’d managed to turn on “reveal codes” or “show paragraph marks” or whatever it’s called in Outlook 2007 (it’s hard to describe a feature that you turned on accidentally, but see the image above). Word calls it “Show Hide P” (”P” being the backwards “P” paragraph symbol that I can’t copy/paste from anything, nor can I find it in the symbols font), and it can be toggled off/on by using CNTRL+*….at least that’s what Word 2007 says, yet that keyboard shortcut didn’t work for me in Outlook 2007.

I couldn’t figure out how to turn this feature off - I’d searched online, the bundled help, and every single menu and options screen I could possibly think of. I should add that I toggled it off/on Word 2007 but that has no impact in Outlook 2007, so the two settings aren’t linked.

I was pulling out my hair, but Sue Mosher (who’s been an MVP for even longer than I have I think) responded to my posting in the Outlook newsgroup with this single line:

Try Ctrl+Shift+8 (which is what Ctrl+* really means).

And that did it. I really have no idea why Ctrl+* doesn’t really mean press the control key and the asterisk key (*) at the same time, but the solution works.