If you have a phone number multiple times in your address book (this means the phone memory + the SIM), the phone number is displayed instead of the associated name (this seem to include incoming phone calls, call logs, SMS messages, etc). There are a lot of complains, here are a few links from the Nokia message boards:

• N96: When recieving call its displays number rather then contact name?
• N82 caller display: displays number but not the name
• E71 sms sender’s name not showing..!

To solve the problem, you “simply” have to delete one of the entries. Of course locating the entries might be tricky (if you can synchronize your phone with a computer, it might be easier). And even though people try to defend this behavior (“If the phone finds the same number against more than one name, it doesn’t know which to use so, perfectly sensibly, it defaults to showing the number”), but in fact it smells like a “decision by committee”:

• Displaying any of the names gives more information than displaying the phone numbers
• Displaying one of the names would make it infinitely easier to locate the source of duplicates
• From a programming point of view, it would be easier to stop at the first match (then again, I’ve heard some theories that the software does some internal hashing and does the lookup based on that, which may mean that “stopping at the first match” may not be so simple)

My final thought? Yes, it is stupid, but it only affects a small portion of the users, and if you know the problem, you can work around it.

Picture taken from Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com’s photostream with permission.

This is especially useful for the default setup I do: an administrative user and a limited user. The system is set to automatically log in to the limited user, and if you want to prevent this, you have to hold down the SHIFT key, which could result in StickyKeys to be activated for the Welcome Screen. Below are two ways to disable this:

First, the hard way:

1. Find the SID for the System account. The easiest way I know of is using PsGetSid:
   psgetsid.exe SYSTEM
2. Open a registry editor and navigate to HKEY_USERS[the SID from the previous step]Control PanelAccessibility
3. Use the values enumerated in this article to customize your settings.

Now, the easy way:

1. Get PsExec.
2. Run the command: psexec.exe -x c:windowssystem32control.exe
3. Go to the Winlogon desktop (the Welcome Screen) by doing Start -> Log Off -> Switch User. You should see the Control Panel displayed and you can change the settings the way you would like them.

PS. This second way makes the Welcome Screen disappear. Don’t worry, you will get it back after the next reboot.

To detect if a user mode debugger is attached to your process, do the following steps:

1. Allocate some memory with HeapAlloc.
2. Write something to the allocated memory
3. Free the allocation with HeapFree.
4. Check if the pattern you’ve written is still present at the given address. If a debugger is attached, it is overwritten with a fixed pattern when HeapFree gets called.

This is probably because attaching a debugger activates the “debug mode” in the heap allocator.