Although the Acronis Drive Monitor is a handy tool for keeping taps on your hard drives’ state, it also totally breaks USB 3.0 (at least on my Windows Server 2012).

Acronis Drive Monitor comes with a service called “Acronis Scheduler2 Service”. As long as this service runs, it somehow breaks access to my external USB 3.0 drives. If I try to copy files to my external drive, the progress will freeze after a minute or so (together with a explorer window trying to access the external drive).

Solution: Stop the service (USB drives will start working again immediately), or uninstall Acronis Drive Monitor completely.

Today’s bug is again sponsored by Mono for Android:

Random “The type or namespace name ‘XXX’ could not be found” errors when building

Mono for Android randomly produces “The type or namespace name ‘XXX’ could not be found” errors when building a solution. These errors don’t really exist and disappear after a rebuild.

Today’s bug is provided by Mono for Android:

NullReferenceException in AppDomain.UnhandledException handler

Today’s bug is a GUI design bug in Windows Server Backup (2012). What do you think of this screenshot?

Why is there an “OK” and a “Cancel” button? What do they mean?

(“OK” means “Close” and “Cancel” means “Stop Backup”. When you start a backup, the button is actually labeled “Close” (instead of “OK”).)

Today, I’ve been hunting down a bug in Mono for Android (4.4.55). This bug flooded the Android log with this entry (thousands of times):

02-04 17:09:32.010: W/(4300): Bad call to mono_mutex_lock result 11
02-04 17:09:32.010: A/(4300): * Assertion at /Users/builder/data/lanes/monodroid-mac-monodroid-4.4-series/6418373f/source/mono/mono/metadata/loader.c:2181, condition `ret == 0' not met

This flood of log messages made the whole deployment process very slow (54 seconds to deploy a fresh project).

As workaround I found that disabling Use Fast Deployment in the project settings “solved” the problem for me.

I’m still waiting for an answer from Xamarin on this issue. Update: This problem is tracked here.