another 'sftpdrop' incident...

I emailed this to Louis (adminstrator of this forum), just seeing if anyone has any solutions to offer:


"Hello Louie,

I've been using smartftp for a few years now. Totally love the program. I recently reformated my home PC with W2K and reinstalled everything. I installed SmartFTP and installed the most recent version and ran into this 'sftpdrop' problem, where when I drop n' drag an item off my webserver to my pc's desktop, it creates an empty 'sftpdrop' folder.

I did some searching on this forum and read up on the suggestions some have made -- reinstall, reboot, etc. Nothing seems to work for me. I log into my machine w/an adminstrator account, but its setup to login automatically as admin, where I don't have to enter a user name or password. I played around with settings, reinstalled the web and full versions, and nothing can rid my problem of the sftpdrop folder when I drop n' drag. I find the drop & drag function super useful too. I really dont want to change my ways of FTP files up to my webserver.

I was just wondering if you have any other suggestions for this problem. Should I try uninstalling sftp completely (again) and then delete any sftp keys out of the registry too ?

also in this thread:
https://www.smartftp.com/forums/viewtopi ... t=sftpdrop
One guy speaks of registering the 'smarthook.dll' file. How would I go about doing this?

thanks for any help you can provide.."

Problems with registration are _usually_ caused by rights issues - three things you could check:

1) Anti-virus software seeking to protect the registry
2) Anti-adware software (eg Ad-Aware) can be set to protect the registry
3) Not sure if your machine is networked or not, and I'm not over familiar with XP, but under NT and 2K you can be logged in as a network administrator and not have sufficient privilege to amend the registry.

There are all pretty faint hopes since you've probably thought of them already.

D

thanks for the info dbarro.
Would you know about registering the smarthook.dll file?

my installed smartFTP shows up with this info (notice there's nothing listed for the smarthook.dll):

+- System -----------------------------

Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional
Service Pack 4 (Build 2195)

CPU Speed : 996 MHz
Total Memory : 523568 KB
Free Memory : 332988 KB

+- SmartFTP ---------------------------

Version : 1.0.980.1
Time Stamp : 2003-12-13 01:25:08

+- Application DLL --------------------

controls.dll : 1.6.980.1
ftpapi.dll : 2.0.980.1
language.dll : 1.0.980.1
reseng.dll : 1.3.980.1
smarthook.dll :

+- System DLL -------------------------

shell32.dll : 5.00.3700.6705
shlwapi.dll : 6.00.2800.1276
comctl32.dll : 5.81
riched20.dll : 5.30.23.1215
schannel.dll : 5.00.2195.6705

+- Internet Explorer ------------------

Version : 6.0.2800.1106

+- Winsock ----------------------------

Winsock : 2.2

Sorry - I don't know the internals of SmartFTP well enough to comment. It's odd that the DLL isn't registering...the install program normally sorts this sort of thing out unless its restricted/restrained by external influences. I recollect one incident where the registry size was limited so that additional entries couldn't be made. (Presumably you've installed other software without problem). Sadly the registry can be pretty difficult to penetrate and has interacting keys (which is possibly why Linux config files are usually simple text files).

The usual advice for this sort of problem is to find the relevant bit(s) of the registry and eliminate them before re-installing the software. However, this is potentially fraught with problems and can cause your machine to become unusable. If it's a production machine you probably don't want to do this without solid backups and time to roll back.

FYI, smarthook.dll seems to be mentioned just three times in the registry, each time as the data for one of the more obscure keys that I would guess is an ID for SmartFTP.

One last thought...It sounds like you installed two versions of SFTP. Did you uninstall the first before fitting the second? I wonder if a badly behaved uninstaller may be causing the issue?

(Sorry for the ramble!!) HTH