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Some time a few years ago, some folks on the security team were swapping crackpots stories, and this one somehow lodged in my mind. The story below is paraphrased, but the essense remains intact. "We had a crazy guy call into the security support line many years ago. He was going through a messy divorce and was convinced that his wife's lawyers w...

A common response when I describe a programming error is, ""Programs should have to pass a test that includes testing for this case." The case could be a program mishandling a message, a program responding incorrectly to , whatever. But these suggestions fall into the same trap that I see when grading student essays: They're good with the what bu...

There are advanced settings in Windows, settings which normal users not only shouldn't be messing with, but which they arguably shouldn't even know about, because that would give them just enough knowledge to be dangerous. And no matter where you put that advanced setting, somebody will tell you that you are an idiot. Here they are on an approxima...

Depending on what version of Windows you're running, there may be a variety of support DLLs for things that aren't formal product components, but which are merely along for the ride. For example, Windows 95 came with MFC30.DLL because the Fax Viewer was written with the help of MFC 3.0. But if you look at Windows 98, MFC30.DLL is gon...

The Swedes haven't quite figured out that my blog entries do not constitute the official position of Microsoft Corporation. I like how they don't even mention my name anywhere. They just say "Microsoft doesn't this" and "Microsoft doesn't that". If you go back to the article they used as a source, you'll see that I provided a variety of reasons f...

Commenter BryanK notes that only already-technical people (re)install Windows; commenter Stu estimates the percentage at 99%. That may be true in the steady state, but the hard part is getting to that steady state. When a new version of Windows is released, the steady state is disrupted. At that point, most people installing Windows aren't techn...

A bug report came in: When I go to the Power Options control panel and select Edit Plan Settings, the Turn off display combo-box is disabled. Is this a bug? Shortly thereafter, this response was submitted: Do you see a big yellow warning over the Turn off display that says that some settings are managed by your system administrator, and a link ...

Commenter Andrej Budja asks why cmd.exe is not themed in Windows XP. (This question was repeated by Serge Wautier, proving that nobody checks whether their suggestion has already been submitted before adding their own. It was also asked by a commenter who goes by the name "S", and then repeated again just a few hours later, which proves ag...

In my mailbox yesterday arrived a few complimentary copies of the Japanese translation of my book. (Note: Still available in English.) I cracked the Japanese edition open and confirmed what I already knew: I can't read a lick of Japanese. But now I know how you all feel when you read this Web site: It's page after page of text that makes no sen...

Somebody asked our team for help because they believed they hit a deadlock in their program's UI. (It's unclear why they asked our team, but I guess since our team uses the window manager, and their program uses the window manager, we're all in the same boat. You'd think they'd ask the window manager team for help.) But it turns out that solving...