Some essential utilities I want to be able to find again or recommend to friends.

Win32 utility to create pop-up balloons from a command line. Essential for scripting!

Website: http://www.paralint.com/projects/notifu/

Win32 utility to send windows messages to applications, allowing you to simulate button presses etc from a command line. You need to use a tool like Spy++ to capture the messages you want to replay.

Website: http://www.maxoutput.com/SendMsg.html

When you rebuild a machine, there are a number of things you always need to do to get it feeling right - such as changing file associations etc. Well now and again I find a nifty trick to do something properly or automatically, and these are listed below.

Just run this command: !!RunDLL32.EXE advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection %windir%\INF\msmsgs.inf,BLC.Remove!!

This 'feature' is just plain annoying, because the default shell action is “Preview” when it blatently ought to be “Open”. This means that even if you install a decent picture viewer, it won't take effect. But you can remove this annoyance with:

!!regsvr32 /u /c shimgvw.dll!!

NB: This also removes the ability to show thumbnails (mini-thumbnails on a folder icon do still appear to work though, but that might be cached)

I hate websites which use href='javascript:window.document.href='…' in their <a>..<a/> tags when an ordinary link would do! You can't middle-click JS links into new tabs!

Here's a script which fixed this for me:

// ==UserScript==
// @name           Rewrite JS URLs to ordinary URLs
// @namespace      myscripts
// @include        http://www.example.com/silly_web_2.0/*
// @require        http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.js
// ==/UserScript==
 
$(document).ready(function() {  
        $("a[href]")
            .each(function(index, domElement){
                var jObj = $(this)
                var rHref = jObj.attr("href");
                if( rHref.match(/^javascript:window.document.location='[^']*'$/) ) {
                    rHref = rHref.replace(/^javascript:window.document.location='/, "");
                    rHref = rHref.replace(/'$/, "");
                    jObj.attr("href", rHref);
                }
            })
        ;
});

You need to replace @include to match the URLs you want the script applied to, and you probably want to change the namespace to better suite your personal organisation of greasemonkey scripts.