Microsoft Rants and Crash Anecdotes

Microsoft really did it this time! Read all about the latest Microsoft idiocy!

Firstly, people curious as to what Microsoft software I have on my system (and for God's sake WHY?) can refer here. The Crash of the Day and archived crashes are located below. There is also a section about software I junked detailling why. But before those come the Memorable Crashes and first, these generic rants.

Generic Rants

1. Microsoft stuff crashes a lot. Monopolies beget poor products. My average uptime is less than 48 hours. Also, Microsoft blames third party software for Microsoft failings! Ever got an error box that says MyThirdPartyApp caused an Invalid Page Fault in MFC42.DLL? The bug is in MFC42.DLL, but Microsoft (indirectly via their O/S) blames the app that happened to most recently request services from the DLL. Scapegoating. And, the fact that the fault lies with a Microsoft DLL is only apparent if you bother to click the "Details >>" button. Common culprit DLLs (all verifiably Microsoft's):
   • MFC42.DLL (The Microsoft Foundation Classes runtime, version 4.2, the latest and buggiest)
   • COMCTL32.DLL (This has your basic checkboxes, buttons, and edit fields...Microsoft can't even get those right!)
   • INETCOMM.DLL (Net related, Outlook Exploder is fond of triggering crashes in INETCOMM.DLL. Maybe INETCOMM.DLL is an OE DLL, since I;ve never seen third party mailers or IE use it.)
   • KERNEL32.DLL (The Kernel Itself! If they can't be bothered to get the core of the O/S straight.....gak.)
2. Microsoft's so-called "knowledge base" tells us two things.
   1. They can't make a knowledge base with an interface worth crud, and
   2. We get to see the sheer magnitude of the problems they cause. There are millions of bug reports, together with their usually- unsatisfactory workarounds (many involve registry fiddling most people will foul up or not do at all, and the rest involve lengthy, tedious, data-losing, preferences-losing reinstallation). Worse, an incredible proportion of their bugs are showstoppers. Enter a search for "hang" or "crash" or "gpf". It will find thousands of articles! Worse, most of them say things like, "Problem: Machine hangs using Word 97. Cause: You have a Logitech mouse and Word 97 SP-1 not SP- 2." ... a lot of people don't know about the obscure service packs. And the fact that Word would differentiate a Logitech mouse shows someone isn't managing dependencies in writing the code. Word should just use the mouse events the O/S provides. If they want to see mouse events of a new kind, then they should make the O/S provide more event types to which an app can listen. They should NOT write direct mouse muchery in their apps which then crash when someone uses an unanticipated breed of mouse (with all the correct drivers installed). They should localize dependencies...to those drivers in this case.
3. Microsoft tech support by phone expects people who ALREADY bought a product of theirs (and got more than they bargained for in "undocumented features" like the above IE box logo) to pay money? Greedy moneygrubbing monopoly. Their email tech support, of course, is ignored... probably discarded by their mail server as soon as it reads the envelope To: without a bounce or error message and without ever receiving the body text. After all, if they had it actually received by a bot that says "Phone our toll line and pay for your help with our problems", their server'd overload. When instead I emailed their postmaster to report an IE crash, I was rudely given a nasty message never to mail them again, and it was CC'd to my then ISP Sympatico! Even though I politely informed the postmaster that the email was being sent to him because if it weren't, no live human would ever read it. Seemed reasonable to me.
4. Service packs and upgrades... ugh. Heard the news about the SP-2 for Office? Browse on over to MSNBC. Microsoft are at least able to admit (however indirectly, through MSNBC, or obscurely, in their "knowledge" base) their errors. They are still stuck on step 2 of Basic Learning to Take Responsibility for One's Actions... to refresh your memories, these steps are:
   1. Admit you have the problem/made the mistake,
   2. And for god's sake FIX IT!
   3. And for the sake of the Multiverse learn not to make the same blasted error again!!
   Actually, they don't even have step 1 down all the time (see above about scapegoating bugs in their DLLs).
   Anyways, the service packs fix some bugs and introduce at least as many new ones. And the upgrades (like the infamous Windows 98) are just service packs to which they have, for some arbitrary reason, chosen to attach a three-figure price tag. (See Upgrade Definitions to relieve some Microsoft tension.)
5. Microsoft buying out various free services on the net and then running them into the ground. Witness Hotmail. Then they bought out LinkExchange and in less than four hours, they were already screwing things up!

• November 6, 1998: Internet Exploder crashes spectacularly a quarter of the way through a 7 megabyte download, throwing up a Blue Screen of Death informing me of "errors writing to Drive C" and saying "data may be corrupted". Ouch. As it keeps generating blue screens every few seconds, I kill Internet Exploder and check that drive C isn't full. 170-some-odd megs free. I click start, shut down, restart the computer, and the machine hangs.
  Sighing, I reboot, and wisely decide to let the scandisk run through its course. It informs me that "the amount of free space on Drive C was being reported incorrectly" and that this is "fixed". Windows starts up, and behaves normal. Drive space free: still says ~170 megs. What is the matter with this crufty software? Was this even Internet Exploder, or some kernel/file system bug, or both? I can't wait until I can buy that 1.5gig removable media drive. Then I can back up all my stuff and sleep easier... and offload less-used files and install Red Hat Linux.
  Subsequently, Windows decided that mrantn2.html (my local copy) was permanently "in use by another application", making it impossible for me to save changes from PFE32. I saved it as mrantn2b.html, exited PFE32, deleted mrantn2.html, and renamed mrantn2b.html as mrantn2.html to get around this. Grrr.
• November 5, 1998: As of early this morning, I discover that Internet Exploder now takes exception to LinkExchange's pages...fatal exception that is. Their front page causes it to page fault consistently after it loads the first graphic; and the member login link causes it to page fault. LinkExchange is now completely useless to anyone using IE, presumably because of a script change they made.
  I fired off an email to admin@linkexchange.com letting them know what's going on, informing them that subjecting thousands of IE users to pages with javascript (or whatever) tested only on Netscape is a big mistake, and requesting politely that they change it back to the way it was last night (when it was working perfectly).
  I then launched Netscrap and went to LinkExchange to login to my account and check hit stats on the fractal gallery. I saw the following message on the member page:
  

      
  Newsflash!
  LinkExchange becomes part of the Microsoft Network. Click here for details.
  
      

  
  Oh. Now that explains everything.
  Read all about it from the horse's mouth. [DO NOT CLICK THE PRECEDING LINK IF YOU ARE USING INTERNET EXPLODER! IT MAY HANG YOUR COMPUTER.]
  Am now going to HotBot to search for other banner exchange networks. You saw how rapidly Hotmail went downhill after Microsoft offered them god-knows-how-many-millions-of-dollars and they promptly sold their souls...
  The Official LinkExchange And Microsoft FAQ | The Unofficial LinkExchange And Microsoft FAQ
• November 5, 1998: Netscape exploded in KERNEL32.DLL. I found I could tuck the error box off the bottom of the screen and use Netscape still. After I was done I tried to find the error box, but it had disappeared. I closed Netscape in the usual fashion, using the close button.
  About an hour later, the Netscape error box mysteriously reappears, the top few rows of pixels showing up near the bottom of the screen. I drag it up to expose the "Close" button and get rid of the damned thing. Windows spits out a Blue Screen of Death, which I okay; afterwards, the system continues to operate normally.
• November 3, 1998: Internet Exploder lived up to its name again. It blew up in "module <unknown>" again. But it didn't simply die. One of the two windows, the one open to rust, remained operable; IE had shot itself in the foot but kept on trucking, slowly bleeding to death from multiple arteries but, like most dinosaurs, proceeding for quite a while on inertia. In contrast, the other window, at Ravages of Radiant, was hung. I tucked the error box away off the bottom of the screen and kept browsing in the other window as long as I could, but eventually the life drained out of it. It didn't hang, but it wouldn't load anything either, as though the connection to the server was down. I went to an Explorer window to do a little work involving making a shortcut; when I right clicked a file and started dragging it, I accidentally strayed out of the window's bounding box onto the hung IE window. At this point, my mouse pointer vanished and the Explorer window hung. I launched another Explorer window (and the mouse pointer returned, but would vanish if it went near the first Explorer window or the IE one), and finished that work. I launched FTP Explorer and uploaded some files, then tried to find the IE error box I had tucked off the bottom of the screen. It was hung now too and would no longer move. I hit ctrl-alt-del: no effect. I brought up taskman; clicked the IE task planning to nuke it. Taskman hung. I popped up Wintop and picked the IE task. No hang. Brought up properties, clicked "terminate now". It informed me in typical brain-dead Windows fashion that it was not responding. Duh. I clicked ok, and Wintop hung. I launched another Wintop to try the same thing. That one hung too. Then I launched a third Wintop and tried to kill the first Wintop. The third Wintop hung. I sighed, shut off ICQ, disconnected from Globalserve (DUN, for once, didn't hang), and chose start/shut down, restart the computer, and hit OK. A dialog informed me that Internet Exploder wasn't responding. I clicked OK, and the computer hung.
• October 27, 1998: I was in the middle of typing in an ICQ message when the computer abruptly hung displaying a black screen with a DOS-type cursor in the upper left corner, blinking but unresponsive. Ever since this incident, I've had an annoying "invalid CMOS configuration data" message pop up at boot, requiring a keypress. The system works fine thereafter, and a thorough looking-over of the bios settings reveals nothing amiss. What the hell did Windows do to it?
• In the last few days of September 1998: Quake 2 hangs. It hangs the whole machine with a nonresponsive, blank grey screen. If a single app hangs a whole machine the O/S is buggy. Windows95 is thus mostly at fault.
• Very Late September, 1998: I install Quest (a DOS Quake 2 editor, intended for using its map error cheker to try to find an obscure glitch in my DM map Twisted's House that QERadiant wasn't able to find). I run it. Just for the heck of it I click load file and click the icon for an empty floppy drive. Drive spins, finds there's no disk. Windows throws up a Blue Screen of Death, which I okay. I am then informed that Quest has performed an illegal operation, yada yada; I choose to close it. (The parent DOS box goes with it.) Icons on my taskbar disappear, and nothing redraws correctly anymore, rendering the computer unusable. I sigh and reboot. Fortunately, the shut down menu was accessible, so no annoying slow Scandisking after. To re-emphasize: if an app can mess up the whole O/S, the O/S has a bug.
• Late September 1998, running Quake 2 qbsp3. For some weird reason, despite an abundance of swap space even with qbsp3 running, Microsoft Windows 95 decides to start acting up; probably it's a bug in the virtual memory core that is provoked when there's a bottleneck of several apps waiting on memory page-ins. Things strangely stop working. First IE4 hangs mysteriously. I go to an explorer window to open a zipfile recently downloaded... I hit the scrollbar in the directory pane, and it scrolls a short way, the screen half redraws, and Explorer hangs. I give it and IE4 the Vulcan nerve pinch; the end task dialog informs me rather idiotically that both of them are not responding. (Yes, I can see that....) Explorer dies, taking my Start menu and system tray and task bar with it; IE does not, or at least it leaves some turds around in the form of its mangled half-redrawn window which refuses to go away when the close button is pressed. Ctrl-alt-del doesn't show IE4 any more. I sit fiddling with some app that was still open, waiting for Explorer to pop back up, bounce that "Click here to begin" thing at the Start menu, and let me check that damned file. It doesn't. I hit ctrl-esc to get the task manager to pop up. It won't. At this point, my mouse pointer disappears, leaving me to click blind. I close everything except the dos box and sysmon, wait for qbsp3, qvis3, and qrad3 to finish (unable to field ICQ messages without the task manager or system tray!) and kill the dos box. The mouse pointer and Explorer fail to return; IE4 fails to go away. Sysmon has apparently hung; the displays haven't advanced in ages. I hit its close box, and it miraculously closes. Now I've got a dead IE4 window, missing mouse pointer, and nothing else. Still can't get the damnable task manager to appear (doubleclick the desktop, ctrl-esc, nothing). Ctrl-alt-del is also now doing nothing. I sigh and hit the reset switch, and abort the long and tortuous scandisk it decides it wants to do first thing, while MY first priorities are to get the heck back online and apologize to my ICQ friends who have been sending messages into the bitbucket unwittingly and wondering why the heck I wasn't answering.
• Mid-September, 1998: An InstallShield installation (Eudora Light) proceeds smoothly until it claims to be done. When the Finished button was clicked, it coughed up a Blue Screen of Death and hung the machine solid. Fortunately, the app it installed (successfully) is free of problems. Blue Screens of Death are, we should all agree, really Microsoft bugs in maintaining the kernel integrity. Let's say it again: A bugfree O/S does not allow one lone app to hang the machine. Besides, InstallShield seems to be some kind of Microsoft-related Windows 95 "feature" for reading .inf script files to install third party software. (Curiously, Microsoft's own software does not use it when installing...)
• August 1997, Hyperterminal PE crashes into a Microsoft DLL. (The DLL undoubtedly is to blame.) At this point Windows spuriously believes the modem is permanently in use. I reboot. Impossibly, the problem persists. (Serious bug in windows TAPI it seems!) I then pop up a DOS box and directly write an ATH0 to the com port. No good. Pick up phone extension. Normal dial tone. Delete the modem in hardware profiles and reinstall its drivers painstakingly (at the time I didn't have a Plug and Pray modem; the 56k Plug and Pray I got later produced its share of interesting, Plug and Pray specific problems...) and finally it works.

• Monday, November 16, 1998:
  
  • Looks like LinkExchange rushed Internic their hundred bucks, because member.linkexchange.com is once again on the map. Unfortunately, the new login system they announce having installed has a rather serious bug: if you put in a valid login and password and click "Log In", you are delivered a nice fat 404 -- Page not found from member.linkexchange.com's httpd. Idiots. Everything Microsoft touches, they screw up!
  • The new Microsoft/LinkExchange partnership did it again: all of a sudden the "member login" link produces a "Host unknown" error from the DNS! Forget to pay up your Internic fees? Guess the reminder note got lost in the paper shuffle resulting from the merger eh? There has also been a lot of slow responsiveness, high pings (~1 second), and assorted server errors and "800c0008" errors at member.linkexchange.com recently.
  • Went to install a component for Internet Exploder 5. Observed that the undocumented feature of Microsoft's most recent version of Active Setup wherein sometimes (frequently in fact) it "downloads backwards" or "undownloads" megabytes of data and sets the progress meter back a ways affects plugin downloads as well as the IE5 install itself (which took several times the promised 20 minutes because it kept stopping and then restarting from various points and thus redoing many sections three or even four times).
    I think the new active setup is not all it's cracked up to be...
• Sunday, November 15, 1998:
  
  • Well, it had to happen eventually. I'm just surprised it took this long. Internet Exploder 5 crashed into a Microsoft DLL, and caused Explorer to hang. I was able to get the system working again using Wintop to perform some neck pinches (as ctrl-alt-del wasn't having any effect).
  • Eudora exploded in MFC42.DLL again. Why oh why can't Bogosoft even get their so-called "foundation classes" right? Heaven only knows.
  • Have had DUN inexplicably drop the carrier a lot lately, and have had it hang Windows 2 or 3 times when going to disconnect. Nothing in the Microsoft "Knowledge" Base about these particular quirks and undocumented features in DUN.
• Wednesday, November 11, 1998:
  
  • Had Internet Exploder 5 open reading news at MSNBC. (I don't know which will blow up in our collective faces first: the Middle East, Y2K bugs, terrorists with biological weapons, catastrophic weather changes secondary to human-assisted global warming, or the economy. At least Yellowstone National Park is no more likely to blow up in our faces now than in the next ten thousand years, the asteroid will miss by 80 million klicks, and before the United States of America can actually start to jeapordize world freedom by becoming such a formidable world power as to be unfettered by any checks and balances, they have to deal with mad anthrax bombers and Iraq...)
    Anyways, little fuzzy Blue climbed up onto the computer table and ran across the keyboard chasing shadows (or possibly his fuzzy tail), and some key he hit made IE 5 expand into the screen, hiding my task bar and tray (including the all-important ICQ icon) somewhat like this:
    
    (this picture taken later on, while browsing rust, after I fully understood the phenomenon.)
    Now I was familiar with IE 4's fullscreen browse feature. It was reversed by using a handy button on the toolbar, a button conspicuously absent in IE5. I tried hitting every key on my keyboard to recreate the circumstances the kitten caused. No go. I minimized it (and got to see the taskbar and tray), but when I maximized it again, it immediately covered up the screen again. I finally right-clicked somewhere on the IE window and found an "Options..." dialog that enabled me to put the damned button where it belonged, on the toolbar. I pushed it and IE returned to normal.
• Tuesday, November 10, 1998:
  
  • Another example of the abysmal security in Microsoft operating systems and servers, of a humorous sort. I was just drifting off to sleep when I heard the distinct tapping of keys. I sat up and sure enough, little fuzzy Blue was standing on the keyboard. On the screen behind him I could see a dialog of some kind in front of the Windows desktop, which had not been there before. I squinted at it...a file delete dialog. With the "Yes" button highlighted. OH NO! KITTY DON'T MOVE! I ran up to the computer; the cat leaped in alarm off the keyboard onto the floor and vanished, fortunately not pressing any keys. I hit ESC and did what I had forgotten to do earlier: launched a Notepad to safely contain the results of kitty's tendency to sudden inspiration leading to nocturnal computer work. (I think my tendency to read certain things aloud when I'm alone is having an educating effect on him; I swear he's aspiring to become a fuzzy little mathematician, for I awoke one morning to find the following equation scribbled in the notepad window: "reee=sd2". Profound...but strangely empty of meaning out of context like that :) I'd use a passworded screensaver but for two things: one, it would seriously slow down Prime95, and two, the devilish kitten would probably manage to guess the password one day while chasing pretend mice across the keyboard. Speaking of chasing mice, he sure does like to knock the computer mouse off the table so it hangs by its cord, and then bat it around. I have had to tuck it between the computer and monitor at night, not so much to protect it, as it is fairly robust, but to keep the damned batting clattering noises from waking me up! He also likes to attack the phone cords, so to avoid being disconnected from the net (and risking a DUN hang) from kitty knocking the receiver out of the cradle on the extension, I've had to bury the phone under phone books and surround it with heavy objects.)
• Monday, November 9, 1998:
  
  • Time to uninstall HomeShite and some other junk accumulated during the Great HTML Editor Search of 1998.
  • Paint Shop Pro exploded in KERNEL32.DLL; fortunately I had just saved. No doubt there is a bug in KERNEL32.DLL.
    Also, the file I had just saved became marked permanently in use. (For some reason, if Paint Shop Pro discovers a file read-only or in use and you go to modify it, PSP will display a dialog about a "server error" and hang! This fortunately requires nothing more drastic than a neck pinch to fix.) I copied the file and took advantage of another Windows bug by deleting the original (the bug of course being that you can delete a read-only or in use file without changing the read only attribute or getting it not in use); then I re-loaded it, finished work, saved, and renamed it to the original name.
    Files becoming marked permanently in use are manifestations of a bug in Windows. (What? Why would we program it to free any locks a program had when it crashed? Our software is perfect, and will never crash, and there is no reason to use third party software, so nobody ever will. Why would anyone use Paint Shop Pro when Microsoft Paint comes free with W95!)
  • Have "upgraded" to Internet Exploder 5. Whether this truly is an upgrade is debatable. It has 1 or 2 new features and is considerably faster rendering some pages. However, there is a nasty bug with the arrow and page-up, page-dn keys in text boxes on web page fields (the keys will also scroll the web page itself! This leads to a lot of blind typing), and Frontpage Exploder is suddenly slow and a bit oddly behaving about the italic and superscript shortcut keys, styled text insertion, deletion, or replacement, and won't work if Num Lock is off (what program in the 1990s even uses Num Lock anymore??? except FP Exploder 5 that is...). It also still exhibits 2 nasty bugs for which the previous version was notorious. It still page faults in MFC42.DLL spontaneously sometimes when working around pages with tables and graphics; and it still "truncates" large HTML files with many tables. (It doesn't actually truncate anything, but it refuses to view all of the file, so parts of it can only be edited blind. The Microsoft "Knowledge" Base reports this as a known problem and says it will be "addressed in a future product" (evidently it wasn't, as it is not only still in FP Exploder 5, it's actually worse, in that the pages it mistreats, it "truncates" at an earlier point!) and says that using ctrl-pageup and ctrl-pagedown to navigate is a workaround (The workaround, like any Microsoft-exhorted workaround that doesn't involve reinstalling something, doesn't work)). Looks like I should just stick to IE 4.01 and PFE32.
    Not too surprisingly, IE 5.0 doesn't render MathML any better than 4.01 did.
    Amazingly, I have yet to see Internet Exploder 5 crash, even after 3 days of frequent use.
  • Got Netcrap 4.5 final. Not too surprisingly, it has bugs: a Composer bug in 4.5 PR2 persists, in which it will spuriously grey out menu items related to editing tables sometimes in situations where the menu items are supposed to be available (e.g., while the insertion point is in a table); it still has a bad habit of exploding in KERNEL32.DLL; and the splash screen continues to say "Netscape Communicator 4.5 PR2". Composer is also just as awkward to use as ever, and just as slow as ever (even on smallish HTML files). Composer sucks the bag; looks like I should just stick to PFE32.
    Not too surprisingly, Netscrape 4.5 doesn't render MathML any better than 4.5 PR2 did.
• Friday, November 6, 1998:
  
  • I have been working on an HTML project that involves too much markup and too many pages to be done efficiently using PFE32. I have been looking everywhere for a WYSIWYG HTML editor that meets my needs. I am beginning to suspect no such beast exists. Frontpage Exploder explodes in MFC42.DLL a great deal, particularly when presented with pages with many large tables or small images. It also won't scroll all the way to the bottom of long pages! It is possible, but impractical, to edit the bottom of such a page blind. I downloaded the 7 megabyte Allaire Homesite timebombware, figuring on datefooling it if it proved to be any good, which it didn't. The renderer seems to have a strange inability to understand a closing tag. "<font face=symbol><i>Italic Greek letters</i></font> Normal Text" renders all in italic Greek letters in Homesite! So much for WYSIWYG. It's also slower than Molasses in January. Amaya seems not to understand the font tag at all, and is (if that is possible) slower than Homesite. So I went to Nonags and had a look for an HTML editor. I found what looked like it would fit the bill.
    And at the end of the 680k download, Internet Exploder did it again. When the download was done, Internet Exploder and Explorer both hung. I neck-pinched Internet Exploder, and the computer hung. *sigh* Once again, the downloaded file is conspicuously missing. Why in the Universe isn't there a better browser for the PC???????
  • Internet Exploder crashes spectacularly a quarter of the way through a 7 megabyte download, throwing up a Blue Screen of Death informing me of "errors writing to Drive C" and saying "data may be corrupted". Ouch. As it keeps generating blue screens every few seconds, I kill Internet Exploder and check that drive C isn't full. 170-some-odd megs free. I click start, shut down, restart the computer, and the machine hangs.
    Sighing, I reboot, and wisely decide to let the scandisk run through its course. It informs me that "the amount of free space on Drive C was being reported incorrectly" and that this is "fixed". Windows starts up, and behaves normal. Drive space free: still says ~170 megs. What is the matter with this crufty software? Was this even Internet Exploder, or some kernel/file system bug, or both? I can't wait until I can buy that 1.5gig removable media drive. Then I can back up all my stuff and sleep easier... and offload less-used files and install Red Hat Linux.
    Oh, this just in -- Windows decided that mrantn2.html (my local copy) was permanently "in use by another application", making it impossible for me to save changes from PFE32. I saved it as mrantn2b.html, exited PFE32, deleted mrantn2.html, and renamed mrantn2b.html as mrantn2.html to get around this. Grrr.
• 11 pm Thursday:
  
  • LinkExchange no longer crashes Internet Exploder. That's the good news. The bad news is that logging in is well nigh impossible, whether or not you use Internet Exploder, because their member server is exhibiting 75% packet loss and pinging around 1000.
    This is not very surprising to me. Hotmail's web server began to behave in exactly the same manner when Microsoft bought them out. I guess that nonresponsiveness to ping and http requests and 1+ second response latency when it does respond is an undocumented feature of Windows NT Server...
• Later Thursday:
  
  • Netscape exploded again, which doesn't surprise me in the least. I found I could tuck the error box off the bottom of the screen and use Netscape still. After I was done I tried to find the error box, but it had disappeared. I closed Netscape in the usual fashion, using the close button.
    About an hour later, the Netscape error box mysteriously reappears, the top few rows of pixels showing up near the bottom of the screen. I drag it up to expose the "Close" button and get rid of the damned thing. Windows spits out a Blue Screen of Death, which I okay; afterwards, the system continues to operate normally.
• Thursday, Nov. 5, 1998
  
  • As of early this morning, I discover that Internet Exploder now takes exception to LinkExchange's pages...fatal exception that is. Their front page causes it to page fault consistently after it loads the first graphic; and the member login link causes it to page fault. LinkExchange is now completely useless to anyone using IE, presumably because of a script change they made.
    I fired off an email to admin@linkexchange.com letting them know what's going on, informing them that subjecting thousands of IE users to pages with javascript (or whatever) tested only on Netscape is a big mistake, and requesting politely that they change it back to the way it was last night (when it was working perfectly).
    I then launched Netscrap and went to LinkExchange to login to my account and check hit stats on the fractal gallery. I saw the following message on the member page:
    

        
    Newsflash!
    LinkExchange becomes part of the Microsoft Network. Click here for details.
    
        

    
    Oh. Now that explains everything.
    Read all about it from the horse's mouth. [DO NOT CLICK THE PRECEDING LINK IF YOU ARE USING INTERNET EXPLODER! IT MAY HANG YOUR COMPUTER.]
    Am now going to HotBot to search for other banner exchange networks. You saw how rapidly Hotmail went downhill after Microsoft offered them god-knows-how-many-millions-of-dollars and they promptly sold their souls...
    The Official LinkExchange And Microsoft FAQ | The Unofficial LinkExchange And Microsoft FAQ
• Tuesday, Nov. 3, 1998
  
  • Internet Exploder did it again. I downloaded an automated reasoning agent from a math site and when the download was done, Internet Exploder and Explorer both hung. I neck-pinched Internet Exploder, and the computer hung. *sigh*
    This just in: the downloaded file, all 650K of it, no longer exists... not in the destination directory, nor in the cache. Now to download it again... argh. Thank God for 56K modems.
  • Ever since the recent "white DOS cursor on a black screen" hang I've had an annoying "invalid CMOS configuration data" message pop up at boot, requiring a keypress. The system works fine thereafter, and a thorough looking-over of the bios settings reveals nothing amiss. What the hell did Windows do to it?
  • Got a spectacular one today.
    
    Yup. Internet Exploder lives up to its name again. It blew up in "module <unknown>" again. But it didn't simply die. One of the two windows, the one open to rust, remained operable; IE had shot itself in the foot but kept on trucking, slowly bleeding to death from multiple arteries but, like most dinosaurs, proceeding for quite a while on inertia. In contrast, the other window, at Ravages of Radiant, was hung. I tucked the error box away off the bottom of the screen and kept browsing in the other window as long as I could, but eventually the life drained out of it. It didn't hang, but it wouldn't load anything either, as though the connection to the server was down. I went to an Explorer window to do a little work involving making a shortcut; when I right clicked a file and started dragging it, I accidentally strayed out of the window's bounding box onto the hung IE window. At this point, my mouse pointer vanished and the Explorer window hung. I launched another Explorer window (and the mouse pointer returned, but would vanish if it went near the first Explorer window or the IE one), and finished that work. I launched FTP Explorer and uploaded some files, then tried to find the IE error box I had tucked off the bottom of the screen. It was hung now too and would no longer move. I hit ctrl-alt-del: no effect. I brought up taskman; clicked the IE task planning to nuke it. Taskman hung. I popped up Wintop and picked the IE task. No hang. Brought up properties, clicked "terminate now". It informed me in typical brain-dead Windows fashion that it was not responding. Duh. I clicked ok, and Wintop hung. I launched another Wintop to try the same thing. That one hung too. Then I launched a third Wintop and tried to kill the first Wintop. The third Wintop hung. I sighed, shut off ICQ, disconnected from Globalserve (DUN, for once, didn't hang), and chose start/shut down, restart the computer, and hit OK. A dialog informed me that Internet Exploder wasn't responding. I clicked OK, and the computer hung.
    One slow Scandisk later, here I am.
    (Notice the little 2^p-1 icon in my tray? I've joined GIMPS. I have been kindly informed by the software that there is a 1 in 50,000 or so chance that 2^6307687-1 will turn out to be a world-record prime number, making me famous and earning me a surprisingly measly $1500 prize. Of course, I'm in it for the science, not the money.........:-))
• Thursday, Oct. 29, 1998
  
  • Not too surprised: Netscape exploded in KERNEL32.DLL.
  • Wanted to check out rust. Pulled down Favorites menu, selected Quake, selected rust, and Internet Exploder herled chunks. Launched it again and same thing. Page fault in "module <unknown>"... that looks suspiciously like a null-pointer dereference to me. Naughty naughty, not checking malloc for null! For whatever reason IE won't work again until I reboot, crashing the moment I try to go anywhere, so I launched Netscrap. I only hope it doesn't hang the machine. It's the new 4.5 beta, hopefully they fixed that one. Anyways it was Netscape's emailer that would hang the machine before. Now I give it a wide berth and use Eudora instead. Oh, this just in..... the moment I tried to launch Netscrap, the computer thrashed my hard drive forever and then belched up a page fault in Eudora... MFC42.DLL, surprise surprise. And it wasn't even interacting with anything, just idle. I swear Windows hates Netscape and somehow has been programmed to punish Netscape users. I wonder what it will do if it wakes up one morning to find that I have a Linux partition and a dual-boot config...scribble on the partition table? God I hope not. I've seen what Windows will do to people using Wordperfect.
  • Was working on something mathematical. Scientific Notebook, for some reason wouldn't launch. I seem to recall Paint Shop Pro doing that too, with the problem actually caused by some mysterious means by Internet Exploder. Killing IE and some other stuff got it to work again.
  • Tried to run Word and discovered that Word is sick to its stomach and doesn't want to be roused, and wants to be left alone to sleep it off. At least, that's the only rational explanation I can think of. Anyways, it simply won't run... says "out of memory", or else hangs requiring a neck pinch. If I try to launch a document instead of the app directly, it launches okay, then says there's not enough memory to load the document; then all the menus and toolbar buttons click, push in, or select okay, except that nothing happens as a result. It's like pushing buttons on the console of a printer that's switched off or a phone that's unplugged. The lights are on, but nobody's home. Fortunately, the little button in the upper right corner is the sole exception, and there's no need for more neck pinching. Sysmon reveals under 33% of memory is in use, contradicting the "out of memory" message Word was producing.
• Tuesday, Oct. 27, 1998
  Have had four recent crashes and glitches.
  • Had the computer hang again trying to close a Dial-up Networking connection.
  • IE4 favorites menu started acting weird. All the folder and file icons turned into generic "windows" icons and the pages couldn't be launched nor the submenus expanded. Have seen this before. Quitting and restarting IE4 fixed it as usual.
  • Tried to do a couple of things in Frontpage Exploder. Was quickly reminded why it is generally best to just use PFE32. Noticed that Frontpage Exploder sometimes corrupts the MFC42.DLL in RAM, requiring a reboot before anything using MFC42.DLL works right. I suspect that the bug is actually in MFC42.DLL.
  • Not ten minutes ago, I was in the middle of typing in an ICQ message when the screen went black with a DOS-type cursor in the upper left corner, and when I tried to tab back, found that the machine had hung.
• Wednesday, Oct. 14, 1998
  Have had two crashes in the last week or so. Both times what happened was, I closed all my Internet-using apps, and put ICQ in disconnected mode, then right clicked the network icon in the taskbar and chose "disconnect"; and instead of it disconnecting as usual, Windows 95 hung with no recovery, forcing a reboot. Whether the hang was due to the kernel, the DUN software and TCP stack, or (more likely) both, it happened within Microsoft code.
• Saturday, Oct. 3, 1998
  • 3 am: Internet Exploder goes crazy again much like the last time, only it doesn't affect Eudora, actually erases icons on the task bar rather than just blacking them out, and only two IE windows are open. I decided to get a screen cap of IE Behaving Badly. But although it left Eudora alone, it did something screwy to Paint Shop Pro: PSP refused to launch, silently doing nothing when opened. I checked mem: Plenty of my quarter-gigabyte free. The earlier Eudora problem disappeared shortly after I had shut off IE, so I took a snapshot of the full screen (I had been intending to anyways) using prtsc (which uses the clipboard, which I avoid for important and hard to recreate data, because I've known large items to simply vanish off W95's clipboard without having been replaced...) and killed Internet Exploder (for about the fourth time, including the earlier gpf it had). I was not too surprised when PSP launched perfectly normally. I hit ctrl-V, diddled the image depth a bit to save bytesize (at no real effect on quality) and saved it as a GIF. And here, Ladies and Gentlemen, for your viewing pleasure, I bring you a work in technicolor and greys titled "IE Behaving Badly":
    
    Notice the following interesting misbehaviors, which suggest that IE4's page rendering mechanisms have had a nervous breakdown.
    
    1. The font in the menus is screwy.
    2. The arrows and ellipses in the menus have been replaced by random-seeming numbers in the same bogus font. Character mapping failure?
    3. The Hotmail web page displayed behind the menu is clearly scrambled nearly beyond recognition, let alone usability, in a way eerily reminiscent of the visual fireworks my Commodore 64 manufactured for me when its VIC chip finally gave up the ghost around eighty million years ago. (Looks at 1 meg s3 trio and 12 meg voodoo2 3dfx and thinks, what a long way we've come!)
       Okay, so I lied...I do check that hotmail account once in a blue moon. Still eerie and strangely appropriate it crashed displaying Microsoft web pages. (If "crashed" is quite the right word for this...behavior.)
    4. Notice I have sysmon running... it indicated my mem use never topped a measly 40 megs. I've had it over 122 without any misbehavior.
    5. And in the system tray, the ICQ icon is conspicuous in its absence, and the large grey hole where it belongs (and still hides, since it continues responding to clicks) is conspicuously anomalous. (Gonna reboot now and get the damned thing back, after I upload this... oh...this just in... A weird little dialog swiped the focus from this typing and said 3 options, "log off windows 95", "restart the computer", and "shut down"... and it was NOT the shut down dialog we all find so familiar (and use to terminate perhaps half of our Windows sessions) but some little compact dialog. Forgot to prtsc a screenshot before I esced it to hell, oh well. Looks like IE has left more residue than just the scrambled ICQ icon.)
    Seeing parts of Hotmail, MSNBC, and Quake Prefab Park 2 scrambled together in IE4's window sure has a funny effect on the mind...
    In case you can't spot QPP2 in that jumble, see the little black area next to the dropped menu? says "PR" in orange with something resembling a candy cane underneath it? It's QPP's Java menu titled "PREFABS" and with the remainder totally mangled. What a crapplet! I might mention as an aside that I once loaded this page and saw the news not updated, no new 'fabs, so I hit the stop button on IE4 and moved my mouse over to the favorites menu; the mouse skidded to a halt when it hit the crapplet's bounding box and a year of disk activity ensued; this eventually settled down, and presented as the end product of laborious calculations a dialog much like the page logo: yet another IE4 gpf. This is the crash that inspired the page logo. Try as I might, I could never get it to replicate, and had to resort to a bit of image manipulation to manufacture the logo. Suffice it to say that box is from a real live W95 crash, just not from IE4 unfortunately. :-)
• Friday, Oct. 2, 1998
  • 9 pm:
    I'm typing away in PFE32 editing the first draft of this web page, and the focus is abruptly snatched from me (another annoying thing Windows and IE4 do) by an IE4 crash dialog much like the page logo. The single open IE window at the time was sitting in the taskbar, totally idle. Not loading anything. Not receiving any input. What the heck did Microsoft do, have a random timer trigger a null pointer write just to piss me off?
  • Around 6 pm:
    I open a third IE4 window browsing the net. Abruptly, several of the icons on my taskbar turn black (the IE windows and Eudora), the ICQ icon in my system tray turns the sickly grey shade of dead flesh (rendering it invisible against the background of the systray and, incidentally, masking whether I have messages waiting), and the window comes up scrambled. What's more, my on screen memory meter shows a sudden 12 megs(!) allocated somewhere, eating into my swapfile a great deal. Some scrolling fixes the view, temporarily at least. At the same time, my Eudora window starts to scramble as do the other 2 IE windows. I click to Eudora to send an email, click the message send button, and get a big fat Page Fault in eudora.exe... interesting, it wasn't doing that before. IE4 seems to have corrupted something. I sigh, click close, and Eudora gives me another one, this time in MFC42.DLL. Seems Windows is beating a dead app... I kill that, and thankfully it shuts up and lets Eudora die in peace. (Contrast Win 3.1, which would cycle the dialog as many as 500 times before finally giving up the ghost! They have admittedly made one single teensy improvement here in w95.) I reload Eudora and click message send. Same crash, although it's a fresh instance. IE, what have you done? A third try, for luck; same result, as expected.
    My browser windows keep acting up and prove very hard to use intelligently. Sometimes the scrolling clears the garbage, sometimes tabbing away and back does, sometimes neither. Meanwhile an Explorer icon turns black too. I use IE to log onto usa.net directly by their crummy, slow web interface to send email to eudora-bugs@qualcomm.com (on the off chance) and then kill IE. The explorer icon returns to normal. ICQ's does not. The 12 megs are released. I restart IE, and it acts normal.
    Subsequently, I find that I can still send email in Eudora using the reply function or by starting from a mailto: web link. Thank heaven for small favors.

• Windows 95: It came with the computer and I don't have the HDD space for Redhat Linux. Planning to get a 1.5gig Zip drive, offload some less-used things, and get Redhat Linux. Eventually.
• Internet Exploder 4.0, latest service pack. It came with the computer, it's free, updates are free, and the alternatives are worse. Netscape 4.x habitually hangs my entire computer; IE just hangs itself, and sometimes causes a few weird glitches in other apps ran at the same time (e.g. Eudora). Opera lacks some important features, such as a back button and the ability to get rid of the damned windowpanes and browse full screen; moreover, it is timebombware. Other browsers are defunct (Mosaic), timebombware, Linux-specific, richware, crippleware, DOS (Arachne), or they just plain suck rocks. I'd use Arachne, except that I use ICQ and I use a third party emailer and I use... etc., and these require Windows. Without 2 modems, I can't run a Windows dialer and TCP session, pop up a DOS window, and dial up with DOS too. Besides, for some silly reason my current ISP (Globalserve) forbids simultaneous logins. (After I pay for flat rate, unlimited hours connect? That seems sort of contradictory.)
• Microsoft Office. The competing lines of products are much, much worse.
• Explorer. (Is there a better shell for w95? I've not seen it.)

• Emailer: Eudora. Known bugs: Occasional (rare) crashes.
• Newsreader: Free Agent.
• FTP: FTP Explorer. Known bug: If a directory list is refreshing and you drop a wad of files into the list pane to upload them, FTP Explorer will have a page fault.
• Telnet, terminal: Hyperterminal PE. (NOT Microsoft's crummy Hyperterminal!) Known bugs: occasional (uncommon) crashes; some problems with the backscroll buffer, backscroll buffer opetions in options dialog, and with inverse video persisting if one is disconnected while inverse video was on.
• Ping, etc.: NetLab for Windows 95. Known bugs: may hang if you try to traceroute or ping a down machine, or use whois when Internic is down (e.g. 50% of the time). A neck pinch will remove it without side effects.
• HTML edit: PFE32. Known bug: may hang requiring a neck pinch if you hit alt, f, s to save while the mouse pointer is near the close, minimize, and maximize buttons on the PFE32 window.
• Text edit: PFE32.
• Scientific edit: Scientific Notebook. Caveat: timebombware. Scientific Notebook has no bugs.
• Image edit: Paint Shop Pro. Known bugs: Occasional (rare) crashes, and it will hang if you load an image that is read-only or in use in another application and try to modify it; a neck pinch will remove it without side effects.
• Internet messaging: ICQ. Known bugs: Server may sometimes fail to respond; client may sometimes refuse to connect claiming a "security error" even when the password is verifiably entered correctly. The latter problem usually clears up after a few minutes, sometimes taking 10 minutes but rarely longer. Client crashes occasionally; this is rare and data loss is not observed.
• Fractal image generation: Fractint and Ultra Fractal. Known bugs: Fractint may hang computing certain high-precision images and may sometimes fail to enter a disk-video mode claiming there is insufficient RAM (when the amount of RAM is verifiably sufficient; it should use the disk if there isn't enough RAM anyways, hence the name "disk-video" mode). UltraFractal lacks some desired features.
• Quake2 editing: QERadiant. Caveat: Carving is as error-prone as in any other Quake or Quake 2 editor. Known bug: Will fail to start if options are set poorly, requiring a reinstall; and is known to crash infrequently, typically when loading a bunch of textures.
• Quake2 map compiling: gddqbsp3, gddqvis3, and gddqrad3. Known bugs: All versions of qbsp3 sometimes generate concave leaves. All versions of qvis3 sometimes crash when low on memory and sometimes generate a faulty PVS causing HOM.
• Games: Quake and Quake 2. Some savegame and networking bugs in the backwards-compatibility department observed with version 3.19. Occasional (rare) crashes. Default network send rate is suitable for users using a T1 whereas the typical user has a 33.6k modem.
• Game server browser: GameSpy. Caveat: nagware. Known bugs: Server refresh is slow. Older versions prone to crashing during server refresh.
• Ray tracer: PovRay. PovRay has no bugs.
• Modeller: Moray. Caveat: nagware. Moray has no bugs.
• C++ compiler: DJGPP. DJGPP has few, if any, bugs and none in code generation.
• C++ Integrated Development Environment: RHIDE. RHIDE has few, if any, bugs.
• ...and lots of other non-Microsoft stuff.

• HomeSite 4.0 HTML editor.
  Besides being timebombware, HomeShite doesn't seem to understand a closing tag. "<font face=symbol><i>Italic Greek letters</i></font> Normal Text" renders all in italic Greek letters! WYSIWYG, my ass. HomeShite is also slow as a turtle. Two thumbs down. Better to use PFE32.
• Microsoft Equation Editor, comes with Word; editor for typesetting mathematical equations.
  Equation Exploder crashes a lot and, from time to time, produces bogus OLE objects that can't be used, only deleted. What a crapplet! Best to stick to Scientific Notebook.
• Microsoft Outlook Express email client.
  Outlook Exploder has an affinity for page faulting in INETCOMM.DLL and elsewhere. Lacks features. Worthless junk.
• Opera web browser.
  Timebombware (while everything else in the genre is free), Opera has many missing features and is awkward to use.
• Quest, DOS Quake/Quake 2 editor.
  Crufty and unstable. It crashes Windows (not just the DOS box) if you enter invalid pathnames.
• Qoole 2.5, a Quake 2 editor.
  Floating point coordinate truncation leads to lots of map leaks and other problems. Carving tool is more trouble than it's worth (although this is true almost universally for all editors, in Q1 and Q2). Qoole is none-too-stable; there are many reports of it crashing into various DLLs, usually either Microsoft's or video-related. There are problems of interface awkwardness and assorted non-showstopper bugs. Qoole 2.5 is also crippled, although there are several hacks. A rumor has it that Qoole 3.0 is in the works, will be released soon, and will fix all of these problems, except for the problem of it being crippleware that is. (Hopefully the hacks will not be counteracted.) A regular on Rust has one word to say about Qoole: "Quuck!" (Of course, he also advocates the use of PFE32 for editing Quake 2 maps. I recommend the milder course of using QERadiant.)
  I will check out 3.0 when it comes out. 2.5 gets two thumbs down.
• Worldcraft 1.6, Quake/Quake 2 editor.
  Two thumbs down. Wormcruft has many bugs and is not very stable. Any clipping, carving, or vertex use generates invalid solids and the "fix errors" command doesn't. It is also timebombware and has a serious bug where it will often output maps with errors that escape the notice of the compilers but cause Quake 2 to hang (the machine, not just itself) loading the map! The bogus-map bug reproduces consistently if certain mapping features are used (e.g. animated textures); and yet the idiots who make this bug-ridden piece of junk haven't seen fit to release so much as a bug-fix patch let alone a reliable and robust Wormcruft 1.7.
• Netscape Composer, HTML editor.
  Composer is slow, prone to crashing in MFC DLLs, and has a serious bug that causes it to disable many table-editing commands by greying out their menu items even when these items should be applicable. This last bug consistently manifests with specific HTML documents and consistently fails to on all others; however there is no obvious common feature shared by all the documents that trigger the bug.
• Microsoft Windows 3.1, operating system.
  Winblows 3.1 hangs sometimes for no obvious reason, is slow, has poor support for most kinds of hardware esp. video hardware, and is a general all around loser.
• Microsoft Mail and News, mail and news readers.
  Microsoft Snail and Snooze are slow, buggy, and crash a lot. The successor to Snail, Outlook Exploder, is equally buggy and crash- prone, albetit slightly faster than Snail.
• Netscape Collabra, mail and newsreader.
  It crashes a lot and is prone to hanging Windows 95 irrecoverably. Stay far away from Collabra.
• Microsoft Windows 95 built-in Hyperterminal, telnet and terminal client.
  Crash-prone and missing important features (e.g. busy phone redial). Other bugs reported. Hilgraeve Hyperterminal PE corrects most of these bugs, leaving only rare crashes and some glitches with the backscroll buffer and inverse video. Use it instead.