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Microsoft just released version 3 of their free network monitoring tool.

Here are some of the new features:

• A completely new user interface
• Real time capture and display of frames
• Simultaneous capture on multiple network adapters
• Multiple simultaneous capture sessions
• Network conversations and a tree view displaying frames by conversation
• A new script-based protocol parser language, and script-based parsers
• Support for Vista/Windows XP/Windows Server 2003
• Support for 32bit and 64bit platforms

Network Monitor 3 is available from Microsoft Connect.

Microsoft has provided a new theme for Windows XP based on their new Zune mp3 player. It's black with an orange start menu, and I like it. It looks nice with the black Office 2007 theme.

Get it here.

If you have Internet Explorer 7 installed, give quick tabs a try. Open several tabs, then click the Quick Tabs button to the left of the tab bar or use the keyboard shortcut (Ctrl + Q). This will show you thumbnails of all your open tabs. From here, you can click the thumbnail, or use the left/right arrow keys and enter to switch to tab you want.

Get it here.

Via Scott Swigart:  "A beta of Virtual PC 2007 is now available."

I just switched from Windows Vista RC1 back to Windows XP, primarily due to driver issues, constant IE crashing, User Account Control (UAC), and the fact that Virtual PC 2004 was unsupported. This past week both Windows Vista RC2 and the Virtual PC 2007 Beta were made available. I'm very tempted to take another chance with Vista, but unless they made some serious improvements over RC1 there is no way. The other problem is that there is no supported upgrade path from RC2 to the RTM version.

XboxMediaCenter is the best home theatre digital media solution out there, and best of all, it's free! Version 2.0 was released last week, and it is very nice. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this project.

To go along with the XBMC 2.0 release, Team Blackbolt has released the MC360 skin for XBMC. MC360 is amazing, and will definitely be running on my Xbox. Great work guys!

Scott Hanselman has a great post on junctions in Windows Vista. Scott mentioned that he was seeing different behavior from David Mohundro surrounding the Documents and Settings folder. I ran my own tests and this is what I came up with.

C:\>dir /ad
 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is 6053-B050

 Directory of C:\

09/16/2006 01:38 AM   <DIR>      $Recycle.Bin
09/05/2006 06:12 PM   <DIR>      Boot
09/22/2006 12:59 AM   <DIR>      dnn
08/29/2006 05:35 PM   <JUNCTION> Documents and Settings [C:\Users]
09/05/2006 06:13 PM   <DIR>      MSOCache
09/26/2006 06:25 AM   <DIR>      Program Files
09/20/2006 02:46 PM   <DIR>      ProgramData
09/29/2006 03:41 AM   <DIR>      System Volume Information
09/05/2006 06:00 PM   <DIR>      Users
09/17/2006 09:06 AM   <DIR>      utils
09/23/2006 04:50 PM   <DIR>      Windows
              0 File(s)            0 bytes
             11 Dir(s) 8,475,971,584 bytes free

So I'm seeing "C:\Documents and Settings" as a junction pointing to the new C:\Users. Makes Sense, but a directory listing on Documents and Settings didn't return anything.

C:\Documents and Settings>dir /a
 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is 6053-B050

 Directory of C:\Documents and Settings

File Not Found

However, I was able to change to "C:\Documents and Settings\rob", and it behaved as expected, showing the same contents as C:\Users\rob. Looking further, when I double click Documents and Settings in explorer I get an "Access denied" message. Looking at the folder permissions gave the answer, Documents and Settings has a special permission setting of Deny Everyone for "List folder / read data".

MojoPac is a new product from RingCube that is essentially a virtual computer you install on a USB storage device (hard drive, memory key, iPod etc.). You can plug the device into any Windows XP computer and have access to all of your applications, games, documents, and whatever else you install on your MojoPac PC. Your MojoPac PC is isolated from the host machine, so that when you unplug, there is no trace of it being there.

I installed it on my iPod and played around with it a bit, and it shows a lot of promise. The basic install only took around 40MB of space on my iPod, plus whatever applications I installed. It wouldn't work on my Windows Vista machine, but that was to be expected.

Watch the demo of MojoPac from DEMOfall 2006.

You can download a 30 day trial version from the MojoPac website.

You can download it now from the Microsoft Download Center. This version supports the RC1 release of Windows Vista.

Here's a list of some of the more significant enhancements courtesy of Jensen Harris: