The Old New Thing

Why did the Windows 95 Start button have a secret shortcut for closing it?

February 13, 2012 Feb 13, 2012 02/13/12

Raymond Chen

Windows 95 had a strange feature where, if you put focus on the Start button and then hit Alt+- (That's Alt and the hyphen key), you got a system menu for the Start button which let you close it, and then the Start button vanished. Programmerman wondered why this existed. This was not a feature; it was just a bug. The person who ...