Muck clients and Windows Vista issues

[Iluna]

It's definitely true what they say... Microsoft Vista apparently
goes to great lengths to protect its users from themselves. After
playing with it for an evening, I've decided that Vista is the well-
meaning straitjacket of OS's. It ties up your hands and arms
completely to keep you from hitting yourself in the head, but in
doing so, it keeps you from being able to do anything useful for
yourself, either.

I've heard people talk about how muck clients don't function out of
the gate under this OS, and I can now verify that for you myself.

The first thing you should know is that raw telnet is blocked by
default in Vista. However, if you go to Control Panel > Programs >
Programs and Features > Turn Windows Features on or off, you can
scroll down to 'Telnet client' and enable it.

(This doesn't help other clients to connect, but at least this way,
regardless of any problems you have enabling your favorite muck
client, you'll at least be able to manage a raw telnet connection in a
pinch if you need to.)

From a quick browse of their respective forums, several of the common
Windows MUCK clients, SimpleMu, Beipmu and MUSHClient, to name three,
all seem to be having similar issues. When SimpleMu is installed, it
will work the first time you open it, but will give an error or even
crash bits of Vista if you try to open it again.

My information here involves what I've spent my evening looking up and
testing out with SimpleMu, and I have now verified that the same
instructions will get MUSHClient up and running as well, so in theory
this might be a general kind of muck client fix. Your mileage may
vary. Also, whether you choose to go offroading in your own computer or
not, is solely up to you. Don't make any system-level changes to
your computer just because I or someone else tell you to. Do your
own research, too, and make sure the authority telling you what to
type is an authority you trust.

From what I've read, there are three concurrent issues here. One of
the issues seems to be the file path itself. One seems to be the
compatibility mode. And the last seems to be the user's rights to run
the program.

The fix you will see on the Mudconnector site and elsewhere, involves
the packet transfer rate and something called Autotuning, which is
causing incompatability with some routers and making idle connections
drop. Instructions and explanations for this workaround are
here. I've included it as an FYI. Don't make that change, though.
It doesn't help.

That's the most popular hint that's going around, and I've mentioned
it here because if you do your own search, it's what you'll
see. However, it doesn't make a difference. After I tried it,
Simplemu would still load once, but only once, just as before. It
would then give an error when I tried to start it again. Now, it asks
me if I'm really okay with it starting, every time, but it does let it
start. So, here are the tips that helped me get SimpleMu and
MUSHclient loading up reliably. In theory, it should work for other
programs as well:

First, DO NOT DOWNLOAD THE PROGRAM INTO THE C:\Program Files\
directory. Because this is a system directory, Vista won't let you
change data in there. Save the program into a different directory.

Second, BEFORE RUNNING THE PROGRAM FOR THE FIRST TIME,
right-click on its desktop shortcut. Go to Properties > Compatibility
and choose to run it as an administrator. You can also, on the same
screen, choose to run it as if on an older platform. I asked it to
believe it was on Windows XP.

And so far, everything works and restarts fine.

If you have comments or questions, or you've gotten other muck clients
working on Vista with these or other steps, please comment on this thread.

[Kaije]

As a foot note to this, Trebuchet does work out of the box on Windows Vista. While this client does not have many of the features some of the other clients have (spell check is currently not working), it is A) free and B) compatible as of this writing.
_________________
To err is human, to really foul things up, you need a computer.