I came across what seems like a really interesting screensaver alternative from Microsoft – The Microsoft Video Screensaver.
Unfortunately it’s part of their Genuine Microsoft Software program. Which means your computer must be validated in order to install, and presumably to use the software.
“No problem”, thought I “I’ve got a legitimate copy of Windows XP Home edition on my box.”
But I also use FireFox as my browser which doesn’t run Active X controls. So I ended up using the alternate validation methods, one to validate my box (GenuineCheck.exe) so that I could actually download the software. This worked fine. And another that I downloaded (legitcheck.hta) that was supposed to prime my box to actually allow the software to install.
Try as I might, every time I attempt to install the Video Screensaver, it fails with a dialog box that gives this URL
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=33171&LegitCheckError=2
and a message saying “Application Not Found”.
Has anybody out there seen this? This is relatively new, the video was only released on July 20, 2005 and I’ve only heard about this “Genuine Microsoft Software” program once before. So I’m pretty sure that this is a teething issue caused by MS being a little too eager to get this program out there…
Oh, and I’ve already tried resetting my default browser to Internet Explorer (I keep it up to date so that I can retrieve updates and visit the sites that have coded specifically for IE). Rebooted and the same error still haunts me.
Nothing so far in Google or on MS’ Knowledge base – but I can’t believe I’m the first to stumble across this problem.