SharePoint 2010 "Welcome menu" is missing

A few month ago, I noticed that from my laptop (Windows 7 professional 64bit + IE 9), sometimes I cannot see the "Welcome menu" ("Personal Action Menu") from SharePoint web page.

Other users didn't get this problem.

I am the SharePoint Farm Administrator and windows desktop Local Administrator, and I can see the "welcome menu" from other computers or other web browsers.

No one changed the master page.

Then, what caused this issue?

After quite a while struggling, I finally found the cause: the default IE "zoom level" was changed before.

How to fix it? Change it again.  :-)

Run IE using different user credentials

To test a web application, quite often we need to log on in different user roles.  Many years ago I created a shortcut to do the work, with help of some third-part tool. But, to keep the environment simple, is there a way to do that directly?

It's not as easy as it looks like.

At first, I tried the DOS command "runas". It doesn't work for IE.
Then, I tried "Task Scheduler". Not easy to let the task program open in current desktop window.
The last one: PowerShell script.

Save the scripts below to a PowerShell script file "RunIEasTestUser1.ps1", then right click the file, select "Run with PowerShell" from the context menu.

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$username = "DomainName\TestUserLogin1"
$password = "somepassword" | ConvertTo-SecureString -asPlainText -Force
$cred = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential($username,$password)

Start-Process -FilePath "C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" -Credential $cred -passthru -LoadUserProfile -ArgumentList "http://testserver"

Rich Text Box control of InfoPath web form has performance issue

IE 8 is slow, but that's not a real issue for most of the normal SharePoint users.  However, recently I got a headache because of that.

There is a InfoPath 2010 web form which contains around 20 Rich Text Box controls. Most of them are usually empty, but sometimes users need to put more than 10 lines of plain text into the form, and they also need to print out the whole form with all data.

Initially Text Box control is chose.  But if we set the height of each Text Box as 3 lines, then when users input 10 lines to text, only the first 3 lines are print out with the form.   Rich Text Box control works well, however it's extremely slow (more than 1 minute) to load the form, even if the form is empty!

When I try to test the same form through Chrome 6 and FireFox 3.6, I guess you already know the result: it's lightning fast (form load in less than 2 seconds)!  What we can do now? We cannot force all users turn to Firefox.

In the end, we have to use Text Box control for most of the fields in that form, and only use Rich Text Box control for the fields really need it.

Any way, with the release of IE9 next year (2011), it won't be an issue any more.