We have a plethora of Smarthome X-10 and Insteon devices in our house—mostly wall switches, a few outlets, some plugin devices and six thermostats. All of this is run with HomeSeer 2.0 software running on our Small Business Server 2003 box.

More than a quarter of the Switchlinc devices we installed with our remodeling about three years ago have failed. As they have failed I have replaced them with Insteon counterparts running in X-10 mode. This works for multi-way switch setups, but I have not yet figured out how to control multi-way Insteon switches using X-10 commands.

My aims in installing the system were modest: it would be nice to be able to reconfigure what items and lights are controlled by different switches in thr house as needs arise. I had no grand plan for home automation.

I am generally pleased with the ability to do what I want in terms of programming the system, but there are few nagging problems—like the inability of one of our SX-10 witchlinc switches to consistently control a lamp plugged into an Insteon plugin device. The desired net effect: when the breakfast area overhead light goes on so does the side lamp. This relationship has been programmed into Homeseer and works sometimes, just not consistently, despite the existence of a SignaLinc repeater in our house. In contrast, the same setup works almost flawlessly in our dining room.

Performance like this would leave me frustrated had I had a grander plan for home automation.

I had heard a couple of months ago that there were problems with the most recent cumulative update for Vista Media Center (KB955519), so I held off on installing it (by not approving recent non-essential updates using WSUS running on our Small Business Server 2003 box).

About 10 days ago, I figured that whatever problems there were would have been had been taken care of and approved all the outstanding updates. That was a mistake.

I got recordings with sound but not video and an ehvid.exe that consumed all available CPU cycles, making extender sessions non-responsive whenever this occurred. In short all of the problems mention in this thread on The Green Button.

So I just uninstalled the update.

I had found the most reliable means of syncing Internet Explorer favorites was to use the Windows Live toolbar button. Until the release of the new Windows Live suite beta today the favorites sync capability had been missing from prior betas.

This sync capability appears to be accomplished through part of SkyDrive and can be accessed by right-clicking on the new Windows Live toolbar in Internet Explorer and selecting Toolbar Options. Then you can select Sync Your Favorites (although no button appears on the toolbar itself.

It is not clear that this favorites sync capability is compatible with the old toolbar button I had been using—in fact my experience and the the fact that this new sync capability operates through SkyDrive—suggests that it is not compatible.