Well I was just designing the new look and feel of a project I have started and it required the use of some gradients images. Now the problem was simple I had a background colour and I needed to fade this to white in my footer (Please see image below). So I created the gradients in PS and saved it as a png.

Upon loading it in FF all was good, but loading it in IE showes the gradient image was not only darker than that in FF but it didn’t blend with the underlying base color.

I strached my head for quite a while and in the end learnt the following.

IE .png palette has a bug in which it cann’t display the gAMA chunk of the image. This causes them to be rendered incorrectly.

Now there are two possible fixes for this.

1. Don’t use a png, use a gif
2. Use this tool to remove the gAMA chunk from the image, http://psydk.org/PngOptimizer.php

Do you get the feeling that Mr Gates hates you and has made Windows so when you most need it, it decides, ‘Well actually today I shall do something totally unexpected expected’, CRASH. Why else would I use it apart from to practice in the art of pulling my hair out and being baffled as to why this has happened to me.

So what went wrong? Well I got a computer in from someone which needed fixing. So I booted it up and got this.

lsaa.exe Security Accounts Manager initialization failed because of the following error: The handle is invalid.
Error status: 0xc000008. Please click OK to shutdown this system and reboot into Safe Mode, check log for more detailed information

If your wondering at the moment why I am writing this, its to try and save you some time if you get stuck in the same situation. In total I spent about 5 hrs trying to sort the problem out. I tried all of the following:

1. Booting into safe mode to read the log and fix the issue, FAILED due to the same error
2. Trying to perform a repair installation using the Windows XP Pro CD, FAILED due to the same error
3. Trying to boot using the XP CD and then use the recovery console, FAILED since the administrator password had been corrupted also
4. Using a CD bootable version of Windows and restore the system to a previous restore point, including the registry, FAILED
5. Replace the lsaa.exe file with a new copy, FAILED

So in the end I had to perform a fresh install. I must say this worked fine. So my advice for anyone who gets the same error, don’t expect it to be an easy fix. In the end it probably will end up with you wiping the computer.

I must also point out I know everyone’s situation isn’t likely to be the same as mine, also I did learn something from this. If the PC in question is a Dell and you have the reinstall CD you can do a lovely fresh clean install wiping every partition and don’t need to worry about Product Keys or Activation. Which I have to say before this I didn’t know about, good news then if you buy a Dell but don’t want any of the ‘free’ programs they leave on which are impossible to use.

Anyway good luck to anyone who has the same issue. A very good tool I also picked up along the way which didn’t help so much with this issue but I can see could come in very handy is BartPE. It is a very good application which creates a small version of Windows XP you can boot straight off the CD. It provides network access and other useful administration features to perform actions on the target PC if you cannot get anything out of the local install of Windows.