Fixing the latest Windows 10 build with d7II

File this under “not surprised.”

The Windows 10 Technical Preview just got a new update, so this morning of course it was nagging me to restart.  After taking care of my VMs and open files I did the restart.  I couldn’t wait to see how usable, or just plain laughable, this new Cortana thing is going to be.

Well I really haven’t messed with it yet, but let me tell you what Windows 10 screwed up that was perfectly fine before:

1. Minor, but it changed my theme colors – actually overriding my sync theme via the MS account.  WTF?
2. The icons in the taskbar are considerably smaller now, not as clear as a result, and I just don’t like it.  I found a (new?) setting, that makes them SMALL it says, but it was unchecked.  Thinking something was wonky, I checked it and applied the changes (with the intention of reverting, of course) to see if that would slap some sense back into Windows.  What happened instead was my icons got REALLY small then, and just went back to annoyingly small when the option was cleared.  Other new found options (whether they existed before or not, I never went looking for them) were more fine grained controls on font sizes and other things — just not what I’m looking for.
3. Here’s the best part though — the networking access was broken.  The built-in troubleshooter first found no issues, so I dug deeper.
   1. I had previously set a static IP address on the ethernet adapter, and I noted that the “status” of the connection still reported that IP, but the actual configuration was changed to dynamic.  I ended up leaving it there for the time being and clicked OK.
   2. When I tried the troubleshooter again — this time it reported an error found, with language like “missing socket entries in the registry” or similar, but it certainly appeared to be referring to a winsock issue.  Despite identifying the issue, the troubleshooter failed to fix it several times, at least reporting its failure (but with no real detail, as usual.)  I didn’t bother rying the usual “netsh winsock” commands since the troubleshooter should have done all that — right?
   3. This is when I finally fired up d7II.  In the internal function for Winsock Repair, an interface opens allowing you to perform repairs with several different methods.  The option that performs winsock repairs WITHOUT replacing any registry entries, and a subsequent reboot, was sufficient to resolve the issue.  Note this exact same repair functionality is also available in the stand-alone utility “WinsockReset” which is freely available from Foolish IT.