Sometimes as a mail server administrator you have to deal with spammers deluging your system, or your users suddenly deciding to email a 600mb Christmas album to the entire office, in july. Of course the first issue can be easily handled by some decent anti-spam measures. But when the second issue happens it can bring your Exchange server screeching to a halt and prevent mail from flowing. Sometimes these emails are important and you can’t just dump them, but for the times when “Frosty’s Magical Christmas Theater Volume XVI” is trying to hammer your mail server to death you can fire up a great tool called AQADMCLI.

First download the tool from Microsoft and drop it into the C:\Windows directory of your server (or if you have a specific directory for tools that you already have in the windows path, drop it there.) then open up a command prompt. Now type AQADMCLI and press enter. You’ll get a new prompt that allows you to enter commands. To clear your mail queue do the following:

Setserver <servername>
delmsg flags=all

It is also possible to delete messages based on specific criteria such as SENDER, RECIPIENT, etc… more complete information can be found by typing HELP from the command line after running AQADMCLI.

What happens if you accidentally remove your Standard toolbar in Excel, or make 10 copies of it in Word? Now you have some horribly mangled Frankenstein version of Office lumbering through your machine. How can you fix this? Well, aside from purging it with fire you can try returning Office to the default settings with the following steps:
Open Excel or Word.
Click on Help.
Click on Detect and Repair.
Check the “Restore Default settings” box.
Click Ok.

This should fix all of your menus and return them to the default state. TADA! No more drooling monster frightening your children.

With Internet Explorer 7 coming into wider acceptance people are starting to have minor problems that crop up every now and again. Some of these may be menu issues, some may be features that no longer work. One quick way to resolve a lot of IE 7 problems is to reset it to the default settings. To do this follow these steps:

Open the Control Panel, go to Internet Options, click the Advanced tab, then under the Reset Internet Explorer Settings option click RESET.

This will solve quite a few issues with IE 7, but it will also remove any Add-ins that you’ve installed. So be ready to reinstall them and remember that the last one you installed might have been the cause of your problem.