Before my arrival at MS as a full-time employee, I had a large part to do with the development of Snipping Tool 2.0, part of the Experience Pack for Tablet PC.
Here are a couple of usage and setup hints, to improve your... um, experience with the Experience Pack, as it were.
1) The installer places a shortcut to launch Snipping Tool onto the shell's Quick Launch toolbar. Don't like it there? Fair enough -- you're free to move or copy this shortcut wherever you find it most convenient! Some ideas:
- place it on the Desktop
- pin it to the Start Menu
- map it to an OEM button or hotkey
Knock yourself out. (Just stop complaining to me that you hate the QL bar! ;-)
2) The first time you attempt to launch Snipping Tool (either immediately after installing, or the first time after each reboot/logon) you may encounter a "SnipMgr process failed to start" error message. This is a curious quirk of some corporate-configured machines, which timeout attempting to check the certificate revocation list while verifying the Authenticode digital signature on the binaries. Snipping Tool will (usually) launch just fine, next time around.
You can workaround this annoyance by changing your machine policy to skip checking certificate revocation lists -- but obviously, I can't recommend that.
The simpler, safer, better solution is to configure SnipMgr.exe to launch, at startup. Once it's up and running, subsequent launch requests should be reasonably speedy. Why didn't we set it up that way? Well, if we'd noticed this problem early enough, we would've addressed its root cause... hopefully, not too many folks will be hit by this.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run] "SnipMgr"="\"C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Experience Pack\\Snipping Tool\\SnipMgr.exe\""
Simply save the above block of text in a .reg file and run it -- take a moment to edit the path, if you've installed somewhere other than the default location -- Snipping Tool will be warmed up and ready, next time you log on!
Happy snipping...
