When I arrived in Australia, I discovered that mum was frantic with an error message that recently kept popping up on her notebook.

Rthdcpl.exe - Illegal System DLL Relocation

The system DLL user32.dll was relocated in memory. The application will not run properly. The relocation occurred because the DLL C:\Windows\System32\Hhctrl.ocx occupied an address range reserved for Windows system DLLs. The vendor supplying the DLL should be contacted for a new DLL.

It’s been awhile since Microsoft released a security patch that broke things!
The fix is here: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=935448

After using GotoMyPC for awhile, I am still giving it a good “thumbs up”. I think the application is very solid and does everything it advertises.

I used it for the past month+ while I was travelling. But now that I’m back, so I thought I might suspend the subscription until my next trip. At $17.95 per month, having that service sits idle just seems like a waste of money.

Anyway, I called their Customer Service and ask for my subscription to be cancelled. When they heard about my predicament, they offered to lower my rate to $9.99 and back-date the discount one month (so I’d effectively only paid $17.95 for the first month of use). And the new lower rate is ongoing, for as long as I keep my account! As I travel often for protracted periods, this is a great deal for me. If you’re a GotoMyPC user, you might want to try this to lower your monthly bill.

With a long career in IT Management, GotoMyPC has alwasy been the arch-enemy. Any application that allows an external system to bypass corporate firewalls inevitably gets the “shoot first, figure it out later” treatment.

With me being overseas, and still needing to access my PC in Vegas I needed a solution. GotoMyPC (which is on the top of the “shoot first” list of every IT organization I’ve ever worked at) was my first and only choice:

• It obviously had enough marketshare: otherwise business poeple wouldn’t be begging their IT for it
• It obviously worked well: otherwise IT wouldn’t be so fearful of it

Rather than giving an over-simplified “dummies” review or a overly-complicated “techies” review, I’ll just summarize my findings after a few days of use:

• It does everything their marketing blurb suggests
• The installation is quick and simple. Although I wish they wouldn’t use Java (I just hate the fact that the Java run time environment keeps popping up, seemingly needing to upgrade every week, and tries to subliminally make me buy Sun stuff).
• It uses a Citrix client (for the techies, nothing else needs to be said after that endorsement)

As long as I have to access my machine remotely, GotoMyPC is a simple and cheap solution that’s technically sound.

Oh, and a word to my IT breathren. Yes, GotoMyPC still needs to be at the top of that arch-enemy list