But there is a resolve

Feb 19, 2009 12:04 GMT  ·  By

An issue originally associated with Windows Vista upgrades has come back to haunt Windows 7, as the operating system was released in Beta stage to the general public at the start of January 2009. According to Microsoft's Nanda Lella, upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows 7 Beta Build 7000 is a process that will kill more than just the Ultimate Extras additions, if in fact the end users run the high-end edition of Windows XP's successor. Lella revealed that the Vista to Windows 7 Beta upgrade would cause the RSS feeds associated with Internet Explorer to no longer update.

This is by no means a new issue. In fact, approximately a couple of years back, Vista users were running into the same issue. The context however, was a tad different. At that time IE feeds were killed by Vista to Vista upgrades. “Our investigations show that these tend to occur after upgrades from one pre-release build of Windows Vista to another version. If you're encountering this issue, first make sure that the feed URL is still valid by manually updating the feed (press F5 while viewing the feed in IE7),” explained Walter vonKoch, Microsoft program manager.

In the eventuality that no error is returned to end users, vonKoch also posted a series of steps designed to mitigate the issue. First “Check if Task Scheduler is running [with the following command:] sc queryex schedule. Look at the "STATE:" line, it should read "4 RUNNING" if it's not running, then start it: sc start schedule. [Next] check if RSS Download Engine is running: reg query HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Feeds /v SyncStatus and look at the "Status" line, it should read "0x01" or "0x1". If it isn't enabled, then enable it: msfeedssync enable,” vonKoch stated.

Next users will have to check for task corruption. This is done with the following command: schtasks /query | findstr /i "user_feed". If indeed corrupted the command will return the following results: ERROR: The task image is corrupt or has been tampered with and ERROR: Task cannot be loaded: User_Feed_Synchronization-{... In this case users will need to delete and recreate the task with the following commands: msfeedssync disable and msfeedssync enable.

It worked for Vista to Vista upgrades, and it also works for Vista to Windows 7 Beta upgrades.