For whatever reason, Microsoft has decided that driver signing is now REQUIRED in Windows Vista x64 (and I hear this also applied to Windows 2008). There used to be a couple of different ways you could disable this requirement, but as of Vista SP1 neither of these methods work anymore. There are also individual pre-SP1 hotfixes that “fix” Windows so you can’t disable the driver signing requirement. This is a big issue for anyone who wants to use tweaked video drivers, or for anyone who wants to use VMWare Server. Read on for the solution.

At a company I work for we recently had to downgrade from the 64 bit version of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 back to the 32 bit version (long story ). After removing the 64 bit version of SQL Server and installing the 32 bit version and then recreating the master db and setting up all of the databases again, Optimum no longer worked correctly. I could log in fine, but whenever I tried to open up Employees, or just about anything else, I got a big nasty error message saying “you must declare the scalar variable @USERID”. Read on for the solution to the problem.