First Technet to read the documentation. There is a vast amount of documentation there, but they seem to deal with “normal” rather than “unusual” circumstances (at least with regards to my issue). I could post a question on the technet forums and wait for an answer. To increase the chances of a resolution, maybe post on another couple of forums just in case I have more luck there?
Both of my posts were answered fairly quickly, and both answers were almost identical. I was told to run a command that I had already run (and provided the result of in my original post) and pointed me to the technet article that I had already read.

And therein lies the problem. That’s possibly all anyone can do for me. There is a limit to how far you can go in supporting proprietary software. Ultimately, support for Windows is limited to the quality of Microsoft’s documentation, and if the documentation doesn’t fix your issue then… then… uhm… another unresolved thread.

So, what are my options? I can keep on trawling forums until I eventually come up with an answer, or give up because I’ve come across an obscure set of circumstances that no one else has come across.^[2]

If I was dealing with an Ubuntu machine, this wouldn’t be a problem at all, but a learning exercise. The Ubuntu wiki article about the relevant package will often contain pertinent information. Failing that, a search on the Ubuntu forums will often yield solutions. But if I’m still stuck at this point I have further options. With Windows, notsomuch.

Has someone filed a bug about the issue? Launchpad and Gnome bugzilla, or KDE bug or whatever the local bugtracker for the project is.

I can pop into irc and ask a real person – with people like Popey for desktop stuff and Ng for all things server related helping out in #ubuntu-uk, you will usually get a definitively unofficial answer pretty quickly.

My point is, with an Ubuntu (and with any open source project) problem I can always find someone who knows a solution, knows someone who knows, or knows someone who can find out. Dig deep enough into the problem and you’ll find a solution. What is more, I could potentially talk to the author/packager/maintainer^[3] about the issue and get a better picture of things from them. And, of course, I can read the source code and even fix it myself.

Which brings up another interesting point. Both of my windows-related forum posts were answered quite quickly, but by someone who merely read the thread’s subject, not the actual content. While I appreciate their effort and understand that they volunteer to help, neither of them felt it necessary to read my post. They looked at the subject and replied with a link to the documentation that would probably solve my issue. Probably, that is, if I hadn’t done any research myself and already exhausted all those options. I wouldn’t have gotten that on ubuntuforums, because there you are credited with a modicum of intelligence and self-motivation.

Instead of spending the last few days learning about the ins and outs of something new, I’ve spent it going around in circles and have no greater knowledge now of the underlying problem than I did last friday.

[1]Actually, I used Bing for the second time ever in case it returned more pertinent
Microsoft information
[2]Or, take off and nuke the entire site from orbit
[3]Better to look for the Debian packager here

Solution from Launchpad

Yes, that’ll do nicely.