{"id":8073,"date":"2012-03-19T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-03-19T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2012\/03\/19\/why-does-holding-the-ctrl-key-when-selecting-new-task-from-task-manager-open-a-command-prompt\/"},"modified":"2012-03-19T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-03-19T07:00:00","slug":"why-does-holding-the-ctrl-key-when-selecting-new-task-from-task-manager-open-a-command-prompt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20120319-00\/?p=8073","title":{"rendered":"Why does holding the Ctrl key when selecting New Task from Task Manager open a command prompt?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Commenter Adam&nbsp;S wonders why <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2010\/07\/20\/10040074.aspx#10040579\"> holding the Ctrl key when selecting New Task from Task Manager will open a command prompt<\/a>.\n It&#8217;s a rogue feature.\n Windows&nbsp;XP introduced visual styles, and one of the tricky parts of debugging visual styles is that if the visual style engine goes berzerk, you can&#8217;t see anything! One of the problems that the visual styles folks encountered when developing their feature was that sometimes they would get into a state where the Run dialog would stop working. And without a Run dialog, you couldn&#8217;t install or launch a debugger to begin investigating what went wrong.\n The solution: Add the rogue feature where holding the Ctrl key when selecting New Task from Task Manager opened a command prompt directly, without involving the Run dialog. From that command prompt, you can then install the debugger and start debugging. (This technique also took advantage of the fact that <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2007\/12\/31\/6909007.aspx\"> console windows were not themed in Windows&nbsp;XP<\/a>. If the visual style system got all messed up, at least your console windows worked!) <\/p>\n<p> Over time, the bugs in the visual style system got worked out, and this rogue escape hatch was no longer needed, but for whatever reason, it never got removed. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Commenter Adam&nbsp;S wonders why holding the Ctrl key when selecting New Task from Task Manager will open a command prompt. It&#8217;s a rogue feature. Windows&nbsp;XP introduced visual styles, and one of the tricky parts of debugging visual styles is that if the visual style engine goes berzerk, you can&#8217;t see anything! One of the problems [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-8073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Commenter Adam&nbsp;S wonders why holding the Ctrl key when selecting New Task from Task Manager will open a command prompt. It&#8217;s a rogue feature. Windows&nbsp;XP introduced visual styles, and one of the tricky parts of debugging visual styles is that if the visual style engine goes berzerk, you can&#8217;t see anything! One of the problems [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}