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Microsoft Blog

These are things that I've come across all on our own, and I assume that everybody at MS uses MS products, so you'd think they they would have banged their heads against this stuff and would have gotten around to fixing it all! Of course, the economics of the situation dictate that they must spend more time and energy (and presumably better reward those working) on "New Features!" which only serve to make the whole thing more convoluted, bloated, broken, and annoying. But it sure does make the stock rise (or not, ha ha ha). Money is the bottom line, and I don't like that. They should just add a default Help entry for all their stuff: "Why does <application name> suck so much poop?" These have been gathering here for many years, so toward the bottom are lots of things that are probably no longer quite valid. Like, they've been 'fixed' with new and even more broken 'functionality'! Apologies in advance for all the typos and grammar problems and things. I've stopped trying to copy-edit this list because it is just too darned long.

A reader sent in this note: You might want to check out "Outlook Annoyances" from O'Reilly. They have a bunch of fixes for a lot of little problems.

These days, I'm mostly running Win XP. Also, I moved from VS6 to Visual Studio 7/.Net and it is killing me so I started a separate list for all that.

927) Here I am in the year 2007 cursing such basic tools as streaming internet video: I left a windows media format lecture on pause for a while and when I return and press play it never starts playing. And, as a kicker, it doesn't give any UI feedback for what it is/n't doing so I have no way of knowing WTF is going on. That's quality with the Microsoft touch.
926) I love how Outlook searches from the oldest items to the newest, when in fact 90% of the time I want to find recent email. So I have to wait for it to go through all sorts of useless stuff before getting a result, if any. And, there doesn't appear to be a way to tell it to search the other way 'round. (I'd hazard a guess that they store things in some linear file so they pretty much have to search in that order, which is just mind-bendingly lame. If they don't have such a restriction then I don't understand why their UI is so explicitly designed to suck.)
925) I minimize a Notepad window. I then Alt-Tab and... I'm back in that Notepad instance. Wrong, wrong, wrong! Stooopid!
924) I am more in the static typing boat. So it drives me nuts when Type.GetType() takes a string which could be "classname" or could be "classname, assembly". Utter API crap, hate.
923) The problem with VS project and solution files is that they are large and it is hard to know what in them is actually important, should you ever need to move outside of VS (e.g. towards makefiles, or even to go from 2k5 to 2k3). I guess the same thing can be said of any build system, but the ones that have all the XML overhead are particularly painful to me.
922) Outlook suck: I'm trying to get rid of buttons to make space, but one of the buttons is a full sized "more buttons" button which I can't get rid of, so there's basically always this entirely useless-to-me part of the screen being taken up by that. Genius!
921) Another fun example of Windows usability suck: I create a new folder, and then I rename it. Then, I "cut" files from that same parent folder (not from the new one, since obviously there is nothing in that new one). The files change color. Then, I realize that I don't want them cut, I want them copied so I can paste them into the new folder as backups, so I can safely edit the originals. So I type Ctrl-Z thinking that will undo the "cut" but... instead the new folder reverts to being called "New Folder".
920) Why yes, this does suck. Especially when mixed-in with folks who willy-nilly used VS2k3 and VS2k5 without realizing the possible trouble (easy mistake to make, don't blame the user, blame the original developers at MS).
919) I love how in Windows XP the Command Prompt application doesn't use Windows XP window controls; I guess it is using some set of widgets from Win95 or something. The kicker is that I am using multiple monitors and wanted to use a utility that inserts a widget in the window title bar to let you move a window between desktops with a single click... and that utility doesn't work with the Command Prompt window, which happens to be the only one I cared about. Yes!
918) The hard disk on a machine fries, so I have to put in a new disk and completely reinstall Windows XP. I'm lucky that I have written down the activation code for that version somewhere. However, when I get into the fun new "Windows Genuine Advantage" bull-crap, it fails with the following super friendly and helpful message: "You have encountered an unknown error." Not "We", "You". How nice. If this machine were not for somebody else, I would have burned all of the MS stuff into ash and installed Ubuntu.
917) It seems to me (I haven't been able to figure out how to force it to repro one way or the other) that mixtures of docking, undocking, and rebooting this Dell laptop results in different screen DPIs being chosen - the screen is pretty high-rez, and so sometimes when I login I see larger fonts (what I want) and other times I see super tiny fonts (I think the default 100% scaling rather than the 125% I want).
916) OK, I don't know if it is Windows or Dell to blame, but: I love how when I have my laptop hooked up to a 2nd monitor and then use the laptop's keyboard shortcuts to adjust the brightness of the laptop screen, the brightness UI appears on the other screen. Whatever!
915) Nice that MS Windows doesn't let you set the Clear Type choice per display. I mean, what if I have my laptop display and then a CRT as an attached other display? Does Clear Type figure that out and do the right kind of futzing on each display?
914) It bugs me that there is no "raise" or "lower" command for windows under MS Windows. You can only have something brought to the very top, or completely hidden with one command. Lame.
913) Microsoft still doesn't Get It when it comes to usability. I made a very small spreadsheet in Excel on my super fancy new Dell D810 that has a 1.73 GHz Pentium M, and 2 GB of RAM. The spreadsheet was all text, with no formulas in it at all - maybe 5 columns by 4 rows in all. I selected the 4 rows and copied the selection, then quit the program... and got a dialog box saying that the clipboard data was large, and asking if I wanted the clipboard contents to be retained or forgotten to save memory. WTF!?
912) "Automatic Updates is turned off." Apparently, so is the grammar checker.
911) The spell check feature in Outlook Express quickly annoys. Rather than showing me one error at a time, which immediately makes me mad because 9/10 things it flags are perfectly fine technical terms, I think it should be like the unix utility 'spell' and show me a list of erroneous words (in some non-suckful, interactive, useful, UI) so I can quickly check things rather than have to go through some hateful click-click-clicking. So, in the end, I tend to just abort the spell check every time. (Yes, I know, I could be a good anal citizen and update the dictionary in the current UI and that way hope to get it down to showing me only real problems, but that is actually more work than I want to do - I think the UI should be good enough that I don't have to do lots of extra work to train the program.)
910) It kills me how dialog boxes for MS products won't let me select and copy out important information.
909) Progress, as measured by Microsoft: making Windows XP take even longer to just bloody shut down. And, having the possibility of all sorts of choices I have to make during the shut down process just to get the bloody thing to shut down: there have been times when I've told it to restart and gone away and come back later assuming it would, you know, have actually restarted, only to find some bloody dialog box telling/asking me something stupid, and preventing the system from doing the actual restart. Great. Wonderful. Terrific. (Similarly with my Dell laptop, you can tell it to hibernate but sometimes it doesn't get into hibernation before you close the lid, so when you open it much later, rather than waking up it actually resumes going into hibernation. Ha ha. Ha. Whimper.
908) Outlook Express didn't seem to have a way to forward an Address Book entry. I had to right-click on it, then copy-and-paste it into an empty message. It pasted the entry as "John Doe E-mail address: jd@foo.com" and then when I sent the letter Outlook marked "e-mail" as questionable spelling. It is great that Outlook can generate text that it doesn't even like itself.
907) At this rate, Apple will replace MS, kinda like how MS replaced IBM, within five years.
906) I don't know if it is Windows or Spy Sweeper to blame, but Spy Sweeper puts up little informational text in baloons, emanating from its Tray icon. Of course, in a brilliant display of utter usability genius, these baloons steal the keyboard focus.
905) It is almost as if Adobe and MSFT are in bed together: Microsoft Automatic Update wants to install a patch for Flash. However, it constantly fails to install. But it still tries to be installed every time I turn off the computer. So that's a nice waste of my time. I downloaded the fix and ran it directly and it put up a dialog box saying that the version of Flash I have on the machine is incompatible with the patch. Yet, the patching system keeps trying to patch it. And I don't realy feel like having to go update Flash so the conclusion to all this is obvious: turn of Automatic Updates. Boy, do I hate everything.
904) You just can't win, especially when you are trying to use Windows FS with some unix target. I'm trying to scp a file from NTFS to a remote linux machine, and the file ends in ".PNG". So I want to change it to ".png" first because the all-upper-case extension looks stupid. Well I get "`trac_clickable.PNG' and `trac_clickable.png' are the same file" of course. (I know, I know, I can just rename it in the scp command line.)
903) Why does everything always have to suck? Windows Media Player will play the videos off of my digital camera and then when the video is done, it resets the view to the first frame of the video rather than leaving it on the last frame. So the final thing that happens while you are watching is a jarring change in the image to something unrelated to what you were just watching a split-second ago. It doesn't take a super genius to see this is broken behaviour and that the system should simply leave the final image up on the screen at the end. I just don't comprehend how things like this get shipped. (Well, OK, I've been through enough product shipments to know exactly how things like this get shipped, but I still have no respect for humanity.)
902) (I love how installation wizard dialog boxes keep forcing themselves to the fore while I'm trying to type in this entry. Everybody sucks.) It kills me that I cannot have more than one sort parameter in the Details view of the File Explorer. I want to first sort by Type, and then sort by Date Modified. But, nooooo.
901) Fundamentally, Project sucks because it can lead you down some road from which you cannot recover - or at least it is not obvious how to recover. Maybe if they could add something similar to Photoshop's History list that might help? Whatever, Project sucks.
900) The depth of my hatred for Windows XP knows no bounds. All I want to do is be able to run (x)copy in a command shell to copy from my USB attached digital camera to my USB attached storage device. The latter shows up with a drive letter. The former... does not. The camera has no drive letter assigned, it is just called "Canon PowerShot A400" in the File Explorer. I've looked in the hardware device listing, I've right-clicked on the camera and gotten Properties, yadda yadda yadda, and yet I still have utterly no clue how to get to the files in the camera from the shell. This is utter insanity. I hate everyone.
899) Project interprets the mouse wheel in different ways depending on what small mode it is in. Sometimes when you use the mouse wheel the entire view scrolls up and down. Other times (a single click in the spreadsheet view can cause the mode to change) the mouse wheel causes the selected cell coordinates to change - you are moving the cursor rather than the view in that case. It is stunningly infuriating.
898) I love how the printer queue dialog box has a field for the printer status that is empty, but the title of the dialog box says that the printer is out of paper which, in fact, it is. I mean, why would you want to have the actual status field reporting status?
888) Printing from MS Project is hell.
887) On this Dell D810 laptop, Windows will put up a new kind of dialog box saying things about the status of the laptop - things like "your internal ethernet has been disabled to save power" or whatever. These dialog boxes are a new kind in that they do not have any close box or anything. The problem is that, apparently, as far as I've seen, these dialogs can take focus away. So I'll be typing my password in somewhere and some laptop status notification dialog will appear and my focus will be lost. Lost to something that doesn't even take input!
886) Now I'm in MS Project heck. There's too much suck about it to really explain it all, but here's a tip-of-the-iceberg example: I have two projects open, but there are three entries for Project in the Alt-Tab list. Two of those three display the same project when selected.
885) Another really nice feature of PowerPoint is how it gets stuck in superscript mode. I end one line with a date like "April 1st" which automatically gives me "April 1^st". I then hit Enter to start a new line of text... and the dumb-ass program ^{is still in superscript mode} until I manually get it back to regular formatting. Genius!
884) The little widget for setting the font size seems stupid to me. It consists of two areas: one is an area where you can type in the font size number, the other is a little button which produces the drop-down of pre-defined font sizes. The text area is at least twice the size of the drop-down button, if not larger. The kicker is, obviously, that I literally never want to type in a font size, I have only ever wanted to pick something from the font size list. So I am stuck having to target the smallest area. Talk about giving me Fitt's.
883) I love how all my slides are a certain color scheme and I go to add a new slide and... it defaults to black-on-white, which is not my color scheme. So every bloody time I make a new slide I have to laboriously go in and set the color scheme to match all my other slides. Genius. (The kicker? It just decided to start applying the color scheme. So it is apparently pretty random when it will and when it won't. That's quality you can bank on!)
882) The system for applying and editing color schemes is an incomprehensible nightmare, in several ways. One eample: I'm trying to make my own scheme based off of a default one, and then play with that scheme. Every time I make a change to my scheme the program creates a whole new scheme, so I have this long trail of old schemes I don't want.
881) PowerPoint lets you set the Line Spacing. I bumped it up to "1.5 Lines". Later I went back to experiment with it again, and was kinda confused to see that the dialog box now said the line spacing was "1 Lines". Apparently it had reset its world view so that what used to be 1.5 was now just 1. Personally, I think that is insane. The kicker here is that if I played around with line spacing the second time, the formatting algorithm appeared to go insane and would end up with non-uniform spacing between lines. Utter insanity.
880) All I'm saying is, PowerPoint supposedly tries to let you type your slide text directy in the Outline frame. However, the behaviour and interaction mechanism is completely non-standard (doesn't work remotely like Word's Outline) weird, strange, incomprehensible, and just plain evil.
879) In PowerPoint there can be many sub-windows or frames open. Right now, I've got the "Search Results" for Help on the right, a picture of the current slide in the middle, and the Outline on the left. I am trying to look through the Search Results on the right. I have the cursor there. As I move the cursor over things in that frame, they get underlined so obviously the program knows I'm looking there. However, if I use the mouse wheel to try to scroll that frame vertically (it has a scroll bar), it doesn't move. Instead, the Outline area moves.
878) I get to use PowerPoint. I wanted to have slide nubmers like "n/m" at the bottom of each slide so my audience would have a rough idea of how far through the talk I am. PowerPoint does have an auto-numbering feature, but it only shows "n". Great. Thanks. How useful for my purposes. The kicker is that it has an option "Don't show on title slide" which I turned on, but I still see a number on my first slide. Nice.
877) It is 2006. I'm running the latest version of Widows XP Pro. And still the bloody system can't handle multiple readers and writers to the filesystem gracefully, even when they are writing to different places. What! Ever!
876) I love how I try to print something from MS Word and it puts it in the queue, then it says there was an error and it failed to print, then the queue says "Error - printing" and then the printer prints the document. Impressive! Also, I set it to print double-sided 4-up to save resources and it takes each page like 45 seconds to process and print. Nice negative reinforcement to the ecologically minded user.
875) The little things kill me, like how Microsoft Update says "downloading" and "preparing for download" at the same time - what is it actually doing? It jumped from "preparing" to "verifying" which makes it look like "preparing" was actually really downloading. Whatever.
874) I'm having trouble with DNS, so I want to know how to clear the DNS resolver cache. Help & Support locks up when I try to search for "dns". Apparently, it is set to look in the remote, online Knowledge Base - and it is getting locked up trying to contact that, is my guess. Freaking genius.
873) I love how quitting Outlook Express doesn't really quit it, and a minute later I get two dialog boxes from it telling me that it couldn't connect... that's why I was trying to get it to quit in the first bloody place.
872) I haven't found a way to do this in Excel: force it to paste text in a font style that I want, and never in the font style from which it was copied. This is killing me; every time I paste something I have to go back and reformat it to the font and size and style that I want.
871) The list of detected wireless networks scrolls in a completely freaking insane way: there are two networks off the bottom of the list, so I click in the scrollbar to "page down". Rather than showing the list scroll up two entries, the entire thing goes into some one-armed-bandit-esque spinning frenzy. It makes it look like it just scrolled through fifty networks or something. Totally wrong, totally out of place, totally weird.
870) I love how setting the view zoon in Excel only changes it for the current sheet, not all of them, and there isn't an "apply to all sheets" option there.
869) Outlook Express's message composition window has the most utterly crack-fueled implementation of undo/redo that I think I've ever seen. The region of text it thinks un/redo should affect is seemingly utterly arbitrary, and pretty much always completely outright useless. Nice!
868) It drives me nuts that Windows XP says how many mail messages I have at the login screen, before I'm even logged in. First off, what if I don't want anybody else who uses the machine to know about my email? Second, the only reason it reports that there is 1 message is because Outlook Express is a pile of utter feces that is stuck on this one piece of email that was deleted off of the server, but cannot be deleted out of my inbox. What the fudge?!
867) I love how you never know if you should left- or right-click on stuff in the Task Bar's Tray.
866) I can't decide if this is really funny or really expletive pathetic: On this nigh brand-new, (currently) almost top of the line Dell D810 laptop running the latest Windows XP Pro, the Notepad and Wordpad applications are broken. These are the most basic, rudimentary apps that you turn to when all else fails, so it is disheartening to see that they are, themselves, utter piles of feces. To wit: Notepad has horrible redraw problems where text will become invisible, but if you select that apparent whitepsace you will see the text, and Wordpad does silly weird things like force the current line to the top of the window whenever I use the Save command.
865) More UI suckfulness: I did a "spelling and grammar" check in Word. It noted some things that I skipped. I wanted to go back and see those things again, but when I try to run the check again it obstinately won't run and just says "The spelling and grammar check is complete." With only an OK button. There's no obvious way to get it to re-check. Nice.
864) I'm very impressed with how Microsoft managed to make a total cluster <expletive> out of their ZIP implementation in Windows XP. It is stunningly slow: we're talking 5 minutes for something that takes less than 30 seconds in WinZip; and copying breaks if you close the File Explorer window that is showing the source ZIP file contents - with no warnings or error message.
863) I love how I tell the MS spyware thingy to allow a given program for ever, yet it asks me every time I reboot. That's usability!
862) When I move a desktop icon into the recycle bin, I get a dialog box talking about how it is just deleting the shortcut, not the actual application. That strikes me as a strong indictment of the whole user interface and usability of the system. Blah.
861) Windows XP is such a tub of poo, and people who write programs for it suck. The latest evidence is that several programs have said they want to turn off AutoRun, and I've said yes, but then the next program I install that wants it turned off doesn't realize that it is already turned off - either that, or the OS has turned it back on sneakily. It all just sums up to a confusing and rather annoying user experience.
860) I don't know what back-asswards school of usability the Microsoft people went to, but here's a clue: not all keyboards have a Print Screen key on them.
859) Real nice how the Help and Support center locks up and I have to kill the process.
858) You can set your system fonts to be larger via the Advanced settings in the Display control panel. The kicker is that like no 3rd party programs are smart enough to know that is possible, so none of them resize smartly, so you end up with text that is utterly screwy. Actually, the real kicker is that Microsoft sites, like Windows Update, don't even get it right!
857) It is impressive how this new Dell laptop with dual-monitor support completely forgets my destop settings when powered off, etc., and when i undock then redock... This is the new millenium?
856) Remind me never to deploy anything using dot net, since Microsoft can't keep it successfully patched. (It is happening to me on a home machine. It appears the fix was to download both .Net 1.1 SP1 and the hotfix, because the hotfix didn't think SP1 was installed, so I had to re-install it over the already installed SP1. Yikes.)
855) I love how right-clicking on an externally mounted hard drive doesn't give me an eject command. No, I have to go to the Tray to find the tool for unmounting hardware. And then it does the standard stupid hateful Windows thing where if anything, like the File Explorer, is showing anything about that item, it will say it can't eject it - but it won't give you a good explanation of why! It just says "try again later" which only serves to mislead and confused. Gah!
854) Remind me never to use Expedia.
853) Whatever MS does, in my mind they can never live down the whole 8.3 vs. 'Program Files' issue. Give! Me! Strength!
852) It drives me nuts that the "Add or Remove Programs" control panel can't tell me what files have been installed for a given program. What planet and century are we talking about, here? Oh, and,

holy discombobulated insane architecture crap

851) I love how Outlook Express lets me try to add a rule in a system where I'm really only getting IMAP email, which is precisely where rules won't work. First, they should have a better way of helping stop the user from wasting time trying to set it up since it will never work. Second, why can't it work? I can manually move things so I don't see why OE can't bloody well do the same thing. Oh, wait, maybe that's what you get when you pay the billion dollar upgrade to get the real Outlook?
850) On two different machines running Windows XP Pro, there is no way to get the MS Trackball Explorer's wheel button to do nothing. One machine has a check box that theoretically should let me do that, but it has no effect - pressing the wheel in still goes into that hated weird scrolling mode. On the other machine, a laptop, there is no option at all for dealing with that functionality! Nice! Hate!
849) IE on my brand new two thousand dollar Dell laptop machine draws grahics at the wrong resolution or size or something. Sweet! We're living in the future, baby!
848) When using the keyboard to go through the Programs under the Start Menu, if the list is long and you end up with multiple columns, you cannot move horizontally - no, you have to move vertically through all of the items in the first row just to get to the second. That just seems dumb.
847) I saw an Outlook 12 Beta demo. I actually think the new UI is freaking cool - all those pathetic OSS UI developers should get some screenshots and use them as suppositories. Oh, and it is amusing to me that the Mac doesn't support the idea of the toolstrip, and is stuck with the bog-standard old menu bar. Ha ha.
846) I hate systems that force a particular sorting order. Like seemingly many things from MS - Outlook Express, for example, forces the folders to be listed in alphabetical order. Stupid!
845) I was downloading a large file on a laptop that runs Windows XP Pro. The laptop is plugged in to the wall, it is not running on battery power. Nevertheless, the laptop turned itself off at like 90% of the way through the long download, presumably because I was just letting it sit and not actually using it manually. So my download has failed and I have to start over. I start the blame with MS, but include Mozilla since Firefox was doing the download, and doesn't have wget-like functionality. Oh, the hate.
844) Also? OE says "message is no longer available on the server" yet when I look at the IMAP server via any other program the message is there and perfectly readable. Too bad Thunderbird's UI killed me so much that I have to stick with OE.
843) I got digitally signed email in MS Outlook Express. When I respond, it wants me to sign my email. I don't have a digital signiture. OE offered to get me one, so I said yes, and that redirected me to a URL at MSN.com... which doesn't actually exist. Yes!
842) While MS Word will let you save a text file with different kinds of line-endings, it conspicuously doens't tell you which OS the choices are for. So if you want to save for, say, Un*x, they aren't going to actually tell you which format to use, thus perpetuating the suckage. Jerks.
841) Outlook Express uses a bunch of sorta vaguely different icons for its windows in the Alt-Tab list. I think they are a pretty perfect example of when text would work better.
840) It is the year 2005 and I still have to fight the bloody Multiple Document Interface crap! Hate!
839) It drives me nuts that Excel scrolls horizontally in cell steps, rather than pixel steps. So if you have a wide cell you get horribly juddery weird scrolling.
838) Rant on, brother. Stupid bloody MS Word.
837) Do not be fooled. If you move your 'My Documents' folder anywhere else, things will suck. Windows still keeps the original version of that folder on the drive/partition Windows was installed onto (which is most commonly C:). So you'll have strangeness where you tell something to download to 'My Documents' and then the file isn't visible - because it is actually in the other 'My Documents' folder. Bloody hell in a hand basket, Gates!
836) Additionally, when I convert to plain text in OE, it doesn't automatically wrap the lines to 80 columns (let alone 75, which would be even better). Oh the hate.
835) Okay! Outlook Express is admittedly not the flagship product, so maybe I am not allowed to complain. But, nevertheless, I will! When I get email from somebody in e.g.: RTF or HTML format, and then I reply to them, OE will use rich formatting to show the excerpted parts of their message. Now, see, I personally do not wish to ever send out HTML or RTF messages. So I change the formatting of the message to plain text. Unfortunately, instead of reformatting the excerpted text to have the standard '>' line header, OE just turns it into regular text. It adds a single line saying "Original Message" which means they are trying to force you to be a top poster.
834) Could the MS anti-spy stuff be any more of a flying turd? Certainly, as far as the UI goes it clearly sucks buttocks: it can't draw itself properly, the help text is empty, and it is completely wrong the way it puts up alert on top of alert so if you were reading one and about to try to do something about it, it interrupts you and makes everything even more stressful and confusing. Religious figure in a hand basket!
833) This is killing me. Even though I've set the mouse wheel button to do nothing, it still goes into free-scrolling mode when I click. I. Hate. Windows.
832) At the end of doing Windows Update, it shows a status report. In it is a red icon that is alarming. It is the "Errors" category. Fortunately, there is a zero next to it, saying there were no errors. Now, here's the UI clue: if there were no errors, then don't put in the alarming red category at all.
831) If you think this kind of thing is bad, just wait until "Trusted Computing" gets shoved into your orifices. Please, go buy a Mac already. Or, better yet, run Linux. (I don't mean that everything will be candy with those two, certainly not Linux, and I am sure that Apple has nothing nice planned for our basic consumer (let alone, in the long run, civil) rights, but it is a trade-off to get away from MS suckage.)
830) Don't you love how Word chokes on large files? Also, don't you love how it has "All Files (*.*)" at the top in the Open dialog box, unlike everything else (e.g.: Notepad, Wordpad) which has it at the bottom?
829) They are pushing .net yet their own bloody main web page for .net has (at least on 2005/7/22) no link to actually download and install it. So then I use their search and find a list of files but no single link that says "just get and install the latest verison for me so I don't have to actually think about any of this. I mean, I already feel really really dirty for deciding to download and install this Microsoft crap in the first place!" Could they be any more completely stupid?
828) Win XP has the ability to read the contents of Zip files (you don't have to download WinZip - I wonder if that is killing their business?). But it totally freaks out when I'm trying to copy things out of those Zip files. For example, it started off saying that the copy would take 3 hours (even though downloading the file took less than a minute!), then about 45 seconds later it said 60 seconds were remaining (with no other time estimate between those two), and then after that it went to saying 2 minutes were remaining! And it has been saying that for more than 2 minutes!
827) Also? The "Copying..." dialog can't handle long paths and ends up drawing crap.
826) I'd always been impressed with how Windows did such a good job with printing... and then I get hit with it not knowing that this printer has a duplexer, and then I have to figure out where that particular option is buried. I did eventually find it, but not through any great leads provided by Windows itself.
825) Oh, sure, the IntelliPoint control panel has an option for hiding the mouse pointer when you are typing. Does it work? No, no it does not.
824) SecureCRT has had this for years, so I don't understand why IE doesn't: If there is a URL that isn't hyperlinked, I want to be able to right-click on it and have a menu option that will take me to that URL.
823) When Windows XP says that it is having trouble with the USB device you just plugged in, here's some suggestions about what try (since I was just in that boat). First, have the device connected via a powered USB hub. Second, pick a more "core" USB port on your computer - the front one didn't work for me, whereas the rear ports where I already had the keyboard plugged in did. Computers suck!
822) Security isn't just the responsibility of one program. I mean, how many times have you thought one application or text area had focus, and typed your password, only to then look up at the screen and see it was actually going into some clear-text area for any and all to see? I think this is an issue with Windows rather than the programs - when I close a the top window, the next application window has a colored title bar, making it appear to have keyboard focus - but often it doesn't, and I have to explicitly click on it to give it focus. So that's pretty broken.
821) The "Windows Picture and Fax Viewer" has little icons for rotating the image 90 degrees. Whoever designed those icons sucks because what they cause to happen is the opposite of what I expect having looked at them. If you look at them very closely it stars to make sense, but nobody should have to read an icon. If there is any alternate design that would work for people just glancing at it, that should be used. In this case the solution would be to reverse the sense of the icons and also remove the microscopic arrows in them.
820) C# kinda screws the pooch when it comes to rethrowing exceptions.
819) At least they have a sense of humor: While Windows 2000 is starting up it actually says, for all to read, "Applying security policy" hardy har har!
818) Everybody needs killed. I sent myself some code in email using Outlook Express. I sent it as an attached .java file. Now, when I go back to look at the email, it turns out that "OE removed access to the following unsafe attachments in your mail" so I no longer have the information. Of course, it did not warn me when I was sending the email that the attachment could have been blocked. Nor is it smart enough to realize that I'm sending the email to myself and take that into consideration. The super kicker is that it is also blocking the attachment when I try to look at it from my Sent Items.
817) Outlook Express has lost contact with the IMAP server. It keeps popping up a dialog box telling me so, and asking me if I want to "Wait" or "Stop". Telling it to Stop apparently is the same as Wait since it comes back pretty soon thereafter with the exact same dialog box. So I quit Outlook Express. Does that stop the dialog from popping up? No. I've hidden it so all I see now is the damned thing blinking in the Task Bar all the time. Grn!
816) I love how MS sorts things in pretty much always the wrong way. The taskbar doesn't let you have things be organized in anything other than the order-you-opened-the-files. The VS .Net debugger chooser dialog box doesn't let things be organized in anything other than alphabetical order. Etc. It seems like another instance of some philosophy that is all about hating the user and trying to make their life hell. Like how the Open File dialog box seems to always start you off in completely the wrong place, guaranteed, every time, no matter what app you are using it from.
815) Allrighty, then. I think that I've come to the conclusion that the OS X Finder file browser just plain sucks. Compared to the Win XP File Explorer, which also sucks in some ways, the OS X thing is just a usability nightmare.
814) The Windows control panel for the mouse is better than the Mac OS X one. I feel like the Mac one never gets the mouse pointer movement right for me. Windows has a better implementation where the parameters end up working out better and I don't find myself being as frustrated with it as with the Mac (or, god, X Windows).
813) Computers suck. It is nice to be using on Open File dialog box, and have it completely wedge with no real explanation of why it has locked up. Maybe there is something in the FS that is locked that is causing it to freeze? Who knows?! All I know is it is lame and super suckful. "Whatever, ship it" is, I guess, the rule of the day.
812) I hate that the only way to burn things is to have them copied first. When filling a DVD, that takes a long time. I don't even know where they are being copied, it certainly isn't the DVD itself since that doesn't happen until the burn actually takes place. I would like to have some option for not doing the copy, rather having the files get locked. Or having some more intelligent aliasing happen or whatever. Waiting for the copy just sucks. (OS X pretty much has the same problem.)
811) I love how string completion is implemented differently throughout MS apps. Even within IE the behaviour is different depending on what text field you are working with: the URL address field lets you use Tab to get the selected completion, but the name field in the "enter your name and password" dialog box uses the strange "arrow down to select" interaction model. Definitely needs a good pistol whipping, there.
810) The way the Minimize, Maximize and Close buttons are grouped together in window titlebars is bad enough. But then Windows Media Player 10 has to go and put yet another control there, to make things even more confusing and error-prone. Sweet!
809) IE's AutoComplete feature puts up a dialog box asking you if you want to use it. The dialog box has a little animation of a mouse cursor moving around doing something. It really confused me because my mouse cursor was in that area alrady, so then I was like freaked out because I had no idea what was happening to my cursor. I've seen things like this before (where the demo or help is too similar to the real world and new people can't tell the difference and get really confused) and I think anybody who does stuff like that is making a mistake.
808) While I'm impressed that anything prints at all, ever (I mean, if you think about getting all the different program output formats, printer drivers, printer formats, etc. all communicating it is pretty crazy stuff) it still drives me up the wall how bad the printing process is. Take, for example, trying to get something to fit to a single page. There are at least two different places on my current machine inside the Print dialog box that deals with that resizing, and heaven only knows how they interact. I sure don't. All I know is more often than not, things don't turn out the way I want and I have to recycle lots of wasted paper, which is lame and sad. (As Waerhauser isn't paying MS to have obfuscated Print dialog boxes to sell more paper.)
807) I have three (3) different CD/DVD type drives. One DVD-ROM, one CD-R/W, one DVD-R/W. The first two are internal, connected via IDE. The last one is external, connected via USB2.0 (high speed, not full speed - whatever!). Anyway, Windows shows seemingly arbitrary and random names for them depending on heaven-only-knows what. Sometimes it labels them: "CD Drive (F:)", "CD-RW Drive (G:)" and "DVD-RW Drive (J:)". Other times, like when the external drive isn't enabled, it labels them: "CD Drive (F:)" and "CD Drive (G:)". By a process of elimination, I've determined that drive F: is actually the DVD-ROM drive; why it can't just say that it is a DVD-ROM drive rather than "CD Drive" I don't freaking understand. Lord, give me strength! (To compound the hate, I can't change the name of things in the File Explorer, or at least append something to the automatically derived name, so I have to keep re-figuring out the stupid blooding mapping. The super extra triple-plus kicker to all this is that if you right-click on the drive and bring up the Properties dialog box, it has an empty text field with a blinking cursor in it, making it look like you could actually add a note... turns out that field refuses to actually take any text.)
806) Here's a happy thing. My machine running XP goes catatonic whenever I try to use (get this) the File Explorer. Like, I right-click to get properties on a file (or click on a "Browse..." button to bring up a file system dialog box in an application e.g.: when installing new software, or even when that works, just using the little expand/collapse tree view to browse) and the entire explorer process locks up. Sometimes it comes back after a minute or so, most times I just kill the process. Yeah, you know, because the file system is something I can easily live without... In the end, it is probably some nefarious interaction of Zone Alarm, Windows XP, Pop-Up Stopper, and the color of my computer's case. Yes, computers are cool! (Update: unplugging my USB CompactFlash card reader seems to help reduce the freezes a lot.)
805) A reader reports: I've got Outlook and it automatically expands a person's name to an email address as I type. Unfortunately, it is expanding to a particular person's secondary address, that I don't want to use. So I get the details on that person and discover that the only email address it lists for them in that Properties dialog box is the correct, primary one. So I have no idea where it is getting the wrong address from, and I have no means of fixing it. Nice!
804) I'm completely at a loss to figure out why: IE has decided that when I click in the scroll bar to go forward one page, that instead it should really go forward two. Whatever. Update: I think I've figured out that if I click close to the thumb area, it goes one page. If I click farther away, it scrolls more. I have absolutely no bloody idea when or how that got turned on, or how to turn the retarded hateful evil wrong satanist thing off.
803) I'm so glad that Reload in IE doesn't actually bother to force a refresh. 'Cause, you know, I obviously don't want the new version when I'm clicking on the Reload button, right?
802) Whoever dreamt up "My Computer" should be thrashed. There already was the idea of the "Desktop" which covers similar territory. In the end, whenever I see those two choices I have to spend two or three seconds trying to figure out which one I actually want to choose. If I don't think but just pick then I get it wrong half of the time. That just isn't the kind of thing you want in a GUI.
801) The Bluetooth Mouse is sorta neat because you get the bluetooth transceiver so you can go hook up other BT stuff. But, the idea of a BT mouse (or just wireless in general? this is the first wireless mouse I've tried) is actually really stupid from the standpoint of mouse ergonomics:
1. It takes a while for the BT system to "wake up" so you move the mouse and nothing happens for five seconds. And then the mouse pointer tries to catch up with your movements, but it gets it sorta wrong, and it ends up looking just utterly spastic. After that it is fine, but when I move my mouse I want it to just work, and immediately, you know?
2. The mouse doesn't have a charging station, it takes 2 AA batteries. That just obviously sucks for all sorts of reasons; dealing with fading batteries; the extra weight; the cost (economic and environmental) of replacing those batteries.
3. The mouse is heavy. Which means it doesn't move very well for small movements, because your hand has to overcome the inertia of the thing. There's just a lot more standing friction.
800) Okay, IE has the address bar, and you can pull-down on its little arrow to see what domains you've been to before. Only it is missing (at least) this one domain that I spend several hours last night looking at (no, not porn, but Camera Quest) . So it seems like the population of that list is just plain wrong and, in this case, useless. Yeah, great, long live the hegemony.
799) I have an LCD monitor. I have 2 machines, I have a KVM switch. If machine B restarts when the KVM is set to machine A, then the desktop resolution goes beyond what the LCD monitor can show, and I have to reboot. Yet I've explicitly set the resolution I want the desktop to be in the control panel. Why does it apparently try to change the resolution to something higher, when it thinks there's no monitor attached? God, I hate Windows.
798) Woe be anybody who makes software and gives it a name that is alphabetically after the word "windows" because then I'll never see it in the Add / Remove Programs list; I'd have to scroll for days and days to get past the ten billion Windows Updates that are listed there. Bloody genius, that is.
797) I'm downloading a file via IE. During that, I go into the IE Settings and Delete Temporary Internet Files. That puts up a wait cursor for ever. And ever. Are they related? Well, the download ends, but the Delete Files never seems to come back. Ever. Whatever!
796) Outlook pisses me off because it has folders and then shortcuts to them, and quickly things get way out of whack and I no longer know what is what. And then some things (e.g.: Archives) aren't searchable in conjunction with other 'data sources'. Yadda yadda yadda. Oh and, Outlook 2003 completely screws the pooch on UI. They've needlessly changed lots of it and made it either hard or impossible to customize it back to how my previous Outlook was. Nice.
795) I love how IE now won't show me anything when I "View Source" now. I didn't find any options to control dis/allowing that. When I search for "view source" in the IE online help it says "No topics found." Guess I should just switch to Linux outright comma you bastards.
794) The C: drive on my Win2K box is filling up. How the hell do I find out where all the space is going? There doesn't appear to be anything like the unix 'du' in the File Explorer or anything. Do I have to know DOS? What is an ordinary computer illiterate supposed to do in this case? Are we living in the future yet?
793) I was musing how XP isn't that bad and that maybe MS products are actually okay, and I could lean to live with them... and then IE tells me the 640MB ISO I was downloading for seven hours is done, but won't fit on the disk and basically the download was gone, lost, kaput. It sucks buttocks in so many obvious ways: It didn't tell me ahead of time, even though it knew how big the download was, that I wouldn't have room. Nor did it tell me where the cached version that IE was keeping was. I really do not understand why it does that - why not just download to the actual file you told it to directly in the first place?
792) I'm not kidding about this: I download the official DirectX 9 installer, and get it going. It downloads more stuff, which takes a long time, and then - and here's the kicker - a dialog box comes up saying "The software you are installing has not passed Windows Logo testing to certify its compatibility with Windows XP. This software will not be installed. Contact your system administrator." Microsoft software is refusing to install other Microsoft software. Sweet! Oh, and then it says that it can't find a file to copy, and then it utterly exits, failing to install DX. Even if I download the full redistributable package (rather than the smaller network installer stub) it fails in exactly the same way. Impressive!
IE is full of unpatched holes. Apparently somebody doesn't want you to know about them any more, however. What is up with that?

791) This is just a cygwin thing? When I'm using the shell, and I use Meta-f and Meta-b, the cursor disappears. I have to wait a second for it to reappear. Happens even if I'm just using the arrow keys to move through the text on the line. Makes it pretty hard to get any line editing done. Blah!
790) I know I've probably already said this a zillion times, but: I cannot begin to express my hatred of the MS Windows dialog design philosophy that has the buttons labeled only "Yes" and "No", rather than something meaningful and context-sensitive like "Open Anyway" and "Don't Open", or whatever, you know? It is one of those things that might seem little to the lowest common denominator human, but which is in actual fact a gateway into the soul of the system: it is a vision of the inner, central, intrinsic, core evil that is the root of Windows and Windows applications. The really funny part is that I'm sure people working on Open Source X windows apps are going to copy it. God, I hate that.
789) Why is it that when I click to order things alphabetically in the Task Manager's Process tab, it sorts Z-A the first time? Everything else (e.g.: File Explorer) starts with the more sensible A-Z. Whatever!
788) Word and WordPad (and probably Outlook, etc.) completely screw the pooch when it comes to scrolling around images in a document when using the mouse wheel. Say you are scrolling the page to read subsequent text (so the image in the window is physically moving up to reveal more text below). When the image gets to the top and you roll the mouse wheel again, the whole page scrolls past the image. It doesn't scroll one text line height to show the next line coming in from the bottom. Which is the half of the page where your eye is. Which is what it should do. No, instead, it scrolls the height of the image. I. Utterly. Hate. That.
787) You gotta admit, it is pretty cool when the Windows Update system doesn't work. The CAB they tell me to use is reportedly corrupt and invalid - both WinZip and the MS extractor programs say so. Yeah, that's the way to impress me!
786) I dislike the toggle nature of the entries in the Task Bar - they either make the window come to the front of the window stack, or minimize down to the task bar. The problem is that if you don't know what state the window is already in (because you have a zillion IE windows open and you can't readily know which one is on top, in terms of which icon in the Task Bar it is), then clicking on the Task Bar entry will only lead you into ever deeper confusion. Yes, the entries in the Task Bar are hilighted differently to try and show which one is on top, but even with all that I still get confused pretty easily. What I would like is for silly people like me to have the option of making Task Bar buttons only bring things to the front, and nothing else. So I could click four times on a button there, and in the end no matter what I'd have that window on top.
785) Mac IE has the Download Manager. But the thing is utterly stupid useless brain dead wrong because it doesn't let you re-download something that was interrupted (my Mac crashed in the middle and I had to reset). Things which were downloaded 100% have a "Reload" option, but the one that got axed part way through doesn't. Which is bloody stupid because guess which one I'm most likely to want to try to download now? Jerks.
784) One thing that pretty much makes my head explode every damned day: When I'm trying to edit text in the address bar in IE (PC), Ctrl-A doesn't select all the text. Instead, it selects nothing and just rings the bell at me. I cannot describe the things I'd do to the person who thought of that, and who implemented it. Augh!
783) It pisses me off that IE doesn't let you scroll the page down to see whitespace past the end of the page. So if you are paging down, the last page doesn't move a whole page. I hate that. It also then makes the mouse wheel really annoying because you barely touch it and the page scrolls back. Argh!
782) It really really really pisses me off that Word moves the Find dialog rather than scrolling the text underneath to show the next match. What utterly stupid dumb cluck signed off on that UI behaviour?!
781) Is it me, or does the calculator accessory that comes with WinXP, even, not have a square root function? It has a log function but the help has literally no occurrence of 'log' in its index, so I'm not sure how to even use it. Whatever!
780) Riddle me this: Why is it apparenlty impossible for me to save the final rendered version of an HTML file via either IE or VS7? The file is basically just text - no fancy grahpics or anything in the originating HTML file, and it has line breaks in it and everything, and I just want to export it the way it looks (minus font formatting, sure) so I can use it e.g.: in Notepad. But, no, when they save things as text they end up saving the source.
779) Word's Find/Replace dialog is still killing me: It won't let me click on the "Ignore Once" button quickly. I mean, I can click on it, but nothing happens. I have to wait a second between clicks for each to actually register. This. Is. Insane!
778) I'm in the "Normal View" in Word and yet when I drag the scroll bar the window doesn't dynamically update. If, however, I'm in "Print Layout View" mode then it does. Whatever!
777) Word is now doing its best to capriciously utterly undo any formatting I have already applied in my document. Nice.
776) I must say, I really don't understand how Word has taken over. Pretty much every time I try to do some numbered paragraph, the formatting goes completely to hell. Things like:
1. A pasted numbered paragraph automatically continues the numbering of the previous one. But I want it to restard. When I tell it to restart, however, the formatting goes utterly insane, shifting everything over to the right a million miles.
2. I had 2 such paragraphs, each restarting the numbering. I pasted a third one and then told it to restart numbering. That not only caused the 3rd paragraph's formatting to go to hell, it also magically forced the 2nd paragraph numbering, which started from scratch, to suddenly change and be a continuation of the 1st paragraph's numbers. Uh, yeah. Nice!
775) Outlook sometimes shows the sender as their full name ("Joe Smith") and sometimes as their email id ("jsmit"). Most of the time, it shows the full name. So when I'm trying to go back and find old email, I'm looking for the full name... and then finally discover it is like the one item that is shown with the email id instead. While I'm willing to believe it has something to do with the source of the email, and the vagaries of email headers, it still sucks a lot of ass.
774) YARtHMP (Yet Another Reason to Hate Microsoft Products): In Word and in Outlook, if I select part of a line of text including the very end of it, and then use the backspace key on my keyboard, the text of the following line is suddenly brought up - apparently the line break (is that CR or NL or both in Windows, another lovely MSism) is deleted with the text I hilighted. I'm pretty sure that on old Mac text editors that would not be the behaviour. Hell, if you use MS Notepad, it doesn't work that way! So I think WordPad, Word, Outlook, etc. are just plain stupid wrong broken asinine misguided dumb hateful crap.
773) For crying out loud. I have a numbered list in Word. I start out with it being all italicized, and then I want to make it not. I hilight the whole thing and un-italicize it, which works on all the text with the exception of the final marker for the final list entry. No matter what I do, I cannot get that leading text to be non-italicized, even though the body text for that item is not. In the end, I have to entirely delete that line and reenter it. Nice!
772) My monitor is set to 1280x1024, and yet the Document Map in Word uses completely illegibly tiny small fonts, completely undermining any useful information I might have been able to glean from it. Impressive! (Help says "In the Format Settings dialog box, select the Document Map check box, and then click OK." But there is no such check box in that dialog.)
771) I'm listening to a CD in Windows Media Player. In a separate IE window, I'm trying to get to a movie on the web. It stops my CD and starts loading the movie in WMP. It doesn't ask me if I want to do that. Then, while it is loading the movie, I'm like "okay, I wanted to listen to a different CD anyway" so I eject the CD and put a new one in. When the tray closes... the movie I was downloading and watching goes away and WMP starts playing the CD I just put in. God. Give. Me. Strength.
770) I use the "go to" feature of Word to go to page 100. I read some stuff there. Then, I want to go to, say, page 20. So I do Ctrl-G and type 20. What happens? It tries to take me to page 20100. Yeah, that's cool. (What they forgot to do was make the old value entirely selected when I bring up the dialog box the 2nd time, so that if I just type something it will be overwritten. VStudio gets it right.)
769) I print something out in Word. Then, I want to print out another thing from Word. The second time I do Ctrl-P, it brings up a dialog I've never seen before in my life, saying something about how Word is already printing something. It is scary, and makes me wonder, "If I try to continue doing the new print job, what happens to the old one? Does it get terminated?" The dialog box in no way attempts to explain or reassure. Hate.
768) In whatever version of Word I'm using, the Status Bar is not something you can turn on from the regular main View menu. Whatever. And, when you go read the help that tells you how to turn it on, it says, "click Options on the Tools menu, click the View tab, and then select the Status bar check box under Show." Note how it doesn't tell you things in the order you'd need to look for them in. It should read "On the Tools menu, click Options...". Yeah, great, terrific. Ship it! Oh, and the kicker is that the status bar doesn't tell you what page you are looking at, it only tells you the page number where the cursor is. So as you are scrolling through the document you have to click every time you wanna know what page you are actually seeing.
767) I'm trying to import data into Excel. I'm constantly tweaking the program which generates it, so I'm constantly re-importing the data. So it is really great that Excel's dialog to find the file to import forgets where I just loaded the file from, every time. It puts me in some god-forsaken other place, and I have to re-navigate all the way back to my file. Every time. Every. Time.
766) I love how if you right-click on IE on the desktop, you get a completely different dialog than if you right-click on the entry in the Quick Launch toolbar.
765) You can download an installer for a program, and run it, only to have it show you the installer for a completely different program. Apparently, somehow Windows gets confused about which .msi it is supposed to be running. That sounds like a really good design, folks.
764) I don't know if it is an issue with Windows, or with this Microsoft mouse hardware, but the scroll wheel has a very annoying tendency: basically, it appears to have been implemented so that it takes like three little steps of the wheel mouse to actually tell the system to scroll once. This is presumably to avoid having the thing scrolling like crazy just because you accidentally touch the scroll wheel once. That is sorta okay (I'd argue that perhaps a better thing to do is make the scroll wheels slightly tighter so one rotational click is a little harder to do, and let 1 click be 1 click, but whatever), but then the problem is you go 3 steps one way, and then you'd expect the threshold to reset, right? So that if you wanted to go back, you'd have to go 3 steps the other way. Well, that doesn't seem to be how it works. However it is done internally, what I experience empirically is that now it only takes 1 step to go backward; the mouse is sitting on the fence and is easily perturbed. Which puts me into the crappy case that I'd guess they were trying to avoid in the first place! So it all adds up to tremendous suck.
763) I'm using Mac IE 5.2.1 (4717) under OS X and it kinda sucks in that:
1. Every time I try to get the Software Update for it, I get a dialog message saying it utterly failed and wasn't updated. There is no further explanation (dunno if that is Apple's fault - Software Update might just plain suck and not allow for more logging or something) so there really isn't anything I can do to try and fix it myself. What. Ever.
2. I've got a macally ikey USB keyboard hooked up to a B&W G3. It has 'home' and 'end' keys in between the alpha-numeric part and the numeric pad. You know, just above the inverted T cursor keys. Anyway, in IE (and not in e.g.: TextEdit) the keys do... nothing when you are in an HTML text entry field. So, like, editing text in Google's search terms field is sheer pain.
3. I'm thinking their selection behaviour when I click in the Address window is completely different from the standard Mac behaviour, and I can't apparently change it, so in the end I'm always caught in some horrible cycle of clicking in various stuttering ways to try and get what I want selected, and only ever having exactly what I don't want selected being selected. A. Complete. Nightmare.
4. There is apparently no way for me to change the font size in the Preferences dialog (by that I mean of the fonts used to actually draw the contents of the dialog), nor can I change the size of the font in the Address entry field. Great. It also doesn't let me make the font in the status bar larger, so when I'm mousing over links and trying to read what they are, my eyes get strained pretty quickly.
5. It fairly often loses the place where I was on the page when I go Back, so then I have to re-scroll down to wherever I was.
6. The address completion kills me; I want there to be a middle ground where it shows the options and lets me pick one, and doesn't default to the first one. So if I type a partial URL (relative to its list of possible matches), and hit Return, it doesn't magically force it to be the longer URL, it leaves it the way I typed it. If I wanted the longer one, I should have to use Tab or arrow-down into that history list and then press Return. Jerks.
7. Its sense of how to resize a window when I click on the title bar 'maximize' button leaves something to be desired.
8. Fairly often, it utterly fails to draw the page. If I move my mouse around, things will draw under the mouse. Of, if I scroll down then back up, things that come in from off-screen get drawn then. Yay.
762) Outlook is so nice and helpful. It has decided that there are a few "James"es that I write email to. So when I'm typing "James" into the To: field, it shows me the list of James it thinks I care about. Well, the top one is a James that I completely do not recognize, and would pretty much never want to send mail to. But already I've accidentally sent him mail twice because Outlook has put his name in the list. How the hell do I remove it? Why is it in there at all? And, why is it at the top of the list? Augh!

761) I upgrade to Windows Media 9. Now, when I try to play or record CDs, the songs skip. This happens with every CD I've played so far. Nice! Now, sure, it might be the CD player in the computer, or something, but if I were just Joe Mr. Off the Street, I'd be like "great, gotta love this upgrade!" But, wait, there's more! When I rip them and play the rips, they skip too! But wait, wait! Playing rips from before the upgrade, i.e.: WM8, also skip! So by upgrading to WM9, all my music is completely hosed! YES! They've reduced my, what, like originally two thousand dollar machine down to something that can't match my fifty dollar CD player. (Oh, and if you search for "bug report" in the WMP help you get nothing. Ha ha ha ha ha. It must be so nice to be the hegemony.)
760) My Win2K box has some network mounted drives. I'm guessing they are what's hosing me - if I try to Open a file in something like VS, then the Open File dialog hangs for a long time, not drawing anything, not responding in any way... yeah, that's customer service! I mean, whatever is causing the problem, you should endeavour to make your system deal with it and avoid having the whole UI lock up for sixty seconds, ya know?
759) I love how even the most recent versions of IE can get into a state where the globe is spinning, and clicking on the Stop button does nothing, and the globe just keeps on spinning...
758) This exemplifies the level of quality I have come to expect from MS products: "Your password expires in 1 days [sic]."
757) I've got WinXP Pro installed on a machine, and when I try to search for files, nothing happens. The File Explorer says that it is searching, but it says that for ever. This apparently only happens when I search My Documents. Argh.
756) They have erred on the side of security, for once? Although right now it is pissing me off, of course. To wit, I open a .htm (start the revolution, not .html) file on my local hard drive, and it falls under the Internet Security Zone. Not Intranet. Hate. So I have to futz around with lowering the security for the entire Internet to run this local test thing. Yay!
755) This is pretty impressive: If I run Outlook twice, I get 2 Outlooks. However, if I then go to the File menu in one of them, and choose Exit... they both go away. Yes!
754) I'm so glad that Windows XP brings back my favorite feature of Windows 95: having the Start Menu disappear out from under you if you use it right away after logging in. Like, you log in, you click on the Start Menu, it appears, you move to find what you want, and as you are doing so it suddenly disappears! Yes! That's user interaction satisfaction, baby! Shoot to kill.
753) When you have a tall list (e.g.: you've maximized the File Explorer) of stuff, with multiple columns, it can be hard to know how that stuff is sorted. So then you think something is missing but really the sort order isn't what you want, and that is why the file isn't showing up where you expect it. I wish the column that is in control of the sort had its background color slightly altered to hilight the fact.
752) All this talk to getting rid of legacy devices like floppy drives, yet my copy of Windows XP Pro is so stupid it can only read off of floppy drives to get extra RAID or SCSI drivers during the install / recover process. Nice!
751) I like how when I tell IE 6.0.2600.blah to clear out the History it asks me if I'm sure, and I say yes, and then... nothing gets deleted. Nice! A little searching through the file system indicates that it deleted everything except for whatever was from "Today". Right, terrific, yeah, great! Idiots.
750) I'm deleting lots of mail in Outlook. The server is taking for ever to actually do it. While it is churning, a reminder for a recurring meeting comes up. I click "Dismiss" on it and then appears a dialog box saying something like "Do you want to delete the item?" which sounds like it wants to delete all occurrences of that meeting, which I don't want to do! So I click No and then realize that it was a dialog box about the messages I was trying to delete. Augh!
749) I'm looking at mail in Outlook. It shows me the headers. However, it shows me the email names as "friendly" names rather than the raw header. That sucks because it just shows e.g.: "Fred Barf" in the CC: lines, and I know that Fred has at least two different email addresses. What I really need to know right now is which one was used. However, when I double-click on Fred it brings up the entry for him in my Address book, but there isn't anything explaining which address it was sent to. So I guess there is no simple way I can find out, short of, I dunno, saving the message out to disk or something? This is so utterly stupid and broken!
748) It kills me that browsers are this lame still: I copy two lines of text, and then try to paste them into the search text field in Google. I only get one of the original lines of text. Why not just bloody well take out the bloody newlines?
747) More you-know-what. Windows seems to have defined standard behaviour to include this: I've got the focus in the main app Window (e.g.: I'm editing text in VS). Then I do Alt-f to get to the File menu. Then, I realize I don't wanna do that, so I press the Esc key. The menu goes away... but when I type suddenly rather than editing the text back where I was, other menus start opening from the menu bar. See, you have to press Esc twice to get the focus back where you started. I think that is blatantly stupid, wrong, broken, back-asswards.
746) I love how even in IE6 you cannot get a view of your Favorites where you see the URL rather than the page title.
745) I'm glad that the Command Prompt still doesn't have any kind of logging.
744) Could the UI for changing desktop icons (e.g.: making the full Recycle Bin look like the empty one so it stops stressing me out) be any more pathetic? Argh!
743) When you set up a restore point in WinXP, there is a text entry field where you can enter a name for it. Underneath there is some help text saying that the date and time are automatically added to the restore point. Presumably, they are telling you this so you don't have to enter it into the title text field manually. It strikes me that since a cardinal rule of UI design is that nobody reads the help text, it would have been better to just show the date and time next to the text field. That was it is just plainly obvious, rather than there being this indirection through the help text, ya know?
742) I am going to start screaming. I'm trying to repair a WinXP installation. I get all the way through loading up to the point where I can type 'R' and get into the repair system. Then it asks me to log into a Windows installation e.g.: by pressing '1' (since there only is one installation on the hard drive), or press 'Enter' to reboot. You know, the key that most times you'd type to get the default selection. So you are, or at least I am, likely to press Enter wanting to just go into the default installation... and instead the machine reboots and you have to start all over again. Not to mention the fact that since there is only one Windows installation, the bloody machine should just boot into that directly. There's really no need to be asking me which one to use. Oh, the hate!
741) Perhaps this is a result of the File Explorer really being IE... say I'm looking at a directory with lots of files in it, and I only want to see the files ending in ".foo". Well, I'd like to enter the path into the Address bar like this: "fu/bar/baz/*.foo". But, of course, that doesn't work. Yay! Thanks! Yes! Wonderful!
740) The so-called Advanced Search in Outlook could more properly be deemed the Advanced Crappy Useless Non-Search. It doesn't let me search both archives at the same time. It doesn't let me search local archives when the networks is down. Etc.
739) I wish the File Explorer had a right-click menu entry for "New Shell Here" (rather than having to find some 3rd party util to get that).
738) Have I mentioned this? When you Search for a file in e.g.: Win2K, you can save the results. Well, there is File / Save Search. Only it turns out that it doesn't actually save the results, it saves the query. So if your search was evil and long and difficult, you potentially have to go through it all over again, which seems why I would have tried the Save Search thing in the first damned place!
737) Maybe there is a way to fix this, but I haven't found it yet: Outlook will put a little envelope icon in the Tray when there is new email. But I really only want it to show up when there is new email in certain mail folders, and not in others. (Or, I wanna turn it off completely.) Blah!
736) I have a Word document with a hyperlink in it. I right-click and choose "Copy Hyperlink". I then go to IE and try to paste it into the Address field. Nothing happens. It never copied it in a form that is useful to other programs, apparently. Yes!
735) Yet another pooch that got screwed somewhere in Redmond: When a program crashes in XP, a dialog box comes up saying you can send a report to Microsoft about it. It will show you various information about the crash. However, there isn't any apparent way to copy that information for sending to anybody other than MS, like, say, the people who wrote the bloody application in the first place, who might be the ones most bloody likely to be able to fix the problem. Gah!
734) Yeah! I love the perfect integration and interaction on MS products! Like, I installed an MS photo editing program (a brand new version) on a box running XP. There is a folder with a bunch of images I'd like to look at. So I select them all in the File Explorer and then right-click on one and do Open With the new photo program. Well, instead of opening all the files, it only opens the one that I was right-clicking on. Yes! Oh, and the photo program doesn't have a key binding for Close Window. (And even if they did, they would probably make it Ctrl-F4 rather than Ctrl-W comma the bastards.)
733) Don't talk to me about MFC. Neither the documentation or the actual implementation seem to be even vaguely correct when it comes to e.g.: the CStringList. Trying to use the Position APIs failed miserably (iterating would just keep returning a single item in the list), and when I looked at the documentation for it, it showed me docs on the parent object list class and then talked about the child classes that handle strings and pointers. But the string one said it returned void*'s and the pointer one said it returned CString's. Just beautiful.
732) My Dell laptop has a little track pad. I also tried using an external PS/2 Kensington track ball. Also, at some point I upgraded to WinXP. Somehow, those things all conspired to make my life suck: the mouse driver ended up being the standard MS mouse driver. The problem is that the trackpad has (apparently in hardware?) a "feature" where you can tap on the pad to simulate a mouse click. Personally, I absolutely loathe it. It makes life total hell. The driver which used to be operational was specific to the trackpad and let you turn that crap off, but here I was stuck with the generic MS driver now. Anyway, I was trying to figure out what to do about it, and saw that I could try to "roll back" the mouse driver. The kicker is that when you do that, it asks you "Are you sure?" but never tells you what it is going to roll back to. So basically it gives you absolutely no information about what it really is going to do, but then it asks you to be sure... Yeah, that is a quality user interaction, there! The kicker is that, of course, after all this I did get the hardware-specific driver, but the checkbox that lets me disable the tap-as-click feature is grayed out. And there is no explanation why. I think that is how it was before, and is what led me to try using the stupid Kensington external track ball in the first place... Ha ha.
731) It tickles me pink how every version of Windows even including XP will have some file lock for several seconds after the using application has been quit by me. E.g.: I have a WinZip file which I expand using the WinZip app, then I quit WinZip, then I go to delete the file... and I'm told that I can't because it would be a sharing violation. So I wait five seconds and try again, and repeat, until eventually I can get rid of it. Yeah. Wunderbar.
730) Yes! Outlook will let me insert a file as all sorts of things, but it won't let me insert it as an inline image. To do that, you have to open another application like Paint, load the file into there, copy it, and then paste it into Outlook. Yeah, terrific.
729) I love how, when I am downloading a file through IE, there are at least two completely different types of dialog boxes that come up. For example, if I minimize one kind, it goes into the Task Bar (like everything else). However, the other kind doesn't go into the Task Bar but instead becomes just a title bar, sitting just above it. What. Ever!!! Gah!!!
728) Why is it that every Windows app has the wrong idea of what a word is in the context of what the application lets you work on? So that when I do Ctrl+arrow it usually goes entirely too far? I mean, in VS7 if you Ctrl+arrow in a path (e.g.: setting the debugging paths) it doesn't take you one directory along, it moves to the very start or end of the line. Isn't that what Ctrl+End should do? The counter example is IE, where to get to the bottom of a page I have to hit Ctrl-End twice to get to the end of the document. I don't know what it is doing the first time. (Yeah, I could just hit End without the Ctrl, but it is habit from other MS apps, okay?) Remember, kids, you can't spell 'whatever' without spelling hate.
727) It is pretty funny how MS doesn't follow its own advice. For example, in Writing Solid Code, it is suggested that returning -1 as a special error code (when non-negative returned values are not errors but, say, indices into arrays) is horribly horribly evil and broken and stupid. And hateful. Well, guess what they've done in C#? Take a look at String.IndexOf(), ladies and gentlemen.
726) Could IE have more different and crappy ways of entering the names of web sites into various Options? E.g.: when setting up Zones it works one way, but when setting which sites to hit directly and skip around the proxy, you enter it a different way. Could I loathe IE more?
725) I still love how there is no right-click menu entry in IE to "Copy as ASCII" so when I paste into other things, they completely freak out on the MS codepage!
724) IE just gets to be ever more an obfuscated pile of poo. For example, how many different paths through the Options UI are there for security? There are the Zones, and then there is the separate Cookie control. So if you set up stuff in a Trusted Zone, that can be somewhat orthogonal to your Cookie settings. And, don't even get me started about Accessibility.
723) Is it me, or does the online MSDN documentation for nmake never specify exactly what kind of timestamp it checks for dependencies? Is it the creation time of a file? The last accessed time? What?
722) I'm using Microsoft Digital Image Pro 7.0. When you paint freehand, you can change the brush shape. I have it set to be a square. What is funny is that the brush cursor remains a circle. So it doesn't really tell me where the paint is going to be applied. Yeah, great. The absolute kicker, however, is that while I'm painting with a solid color, and with a solid brush (no fade out around the brush edges), the program is spitting out artifacts all over the place. It literally cannot paint correctly!
721) You'd think that Nmake would have a full complement of debugging messages and tools. Well, you'd be wrong.
720) Nmake checks the timestamps on files down to the second. However, "dir" only shows you down to the minute. So you cannot use "dir" to debug timestamp dependency bugs. Yeah! That's what I call a real development system!
719) Can I just say that filename completion in the DOS Shell in (at least) Win2K is utterly stupid? It does greedy completion rather than stopping at the first difference. Since I grew up using the unix approach, I find the MS implementation to be completely from hell.
718) Why I like the Xbox over e.g.: the PS2... I didn't have to go out and buy a stupid 8 meg ram card for 25 bucks after spending cash on the console. Sony, gurm!
717) I have an Xbox. When you turn it on without any DVD in it, you get the green screens that are the configuration menus. That is all well and good, but what sucks ass about them is that even when you are doing nothing, the thing is making noise; various sound effects. Look, if I'm not doing anything with the thing, I want it to be silent, okay?
716) Yeah, Outlook, baby! Yeah! I go to open pretty much any attached .jpg and all I get is "the path couldn't be found." No further explanation. Yeah!!
715) Some reasons why I hate MS Access:
1. I'm looking through sorted data and find the place where I want to add a new record. So I right-click and add a new record there because I want to be able to see the context of the other stuff to help me enter the right new data. However, Access forces me to the last line of the entire DB, far far away from any context I need. This does not put me in a good mood. (Especially since Excel does it right.)
2. You can't triple-click in a cell to select all the text in it. So I use the thing where you can select the whole cell (not just it's text) and copy that. Then I go to the next cell over to paste - which works - but after that happens the selection goes to the next row in the DB (which actually isn't even a valid row, it is the end of the world in the DB). Quite possibly one of the top ten most stupid places for the selection to go!
714) More blatant stupidity: I am telnetted to various places. I'm also running Windows Update in the background via IE. When WU gets done, it puts up a dialog telling me that I need to reboot... and it kills all my telnet connections! What a complete piece of hateful crap! Hate!
713) Ugh. You'd think the Out of Office Assistant UI would be like, well, good. You'd be wrong. Hate!
712) I'm not sure I can find enough expletives: there is no logging of Outlooks rules being applied. So it is rather difficult to debug them. (I'm not even working on a complicated one, but Outlook is such a pile of poo that it doesn't work.)
711) Outlook's Rules Wizard: A new height of suck!
710) USB simply doesn't work on any of my WinXP boxes. Well, actually, I've had things connected successfully maybe once or twice, but even then within a reboot or two everything goes to hell. What is so bloody difficult about supporting bloody USB? I thought the whole point of USB was to make connecting peripherals fool-proof? Gah, I hate everybody. See, I have a USB hub with built-in IRDA. It worked for a while on my latest WinXP PC... and then stopped being recognized as having IR after I installed the Nokia software that is supposed to let me sync with my phone. Ironic, since that is the single reason I bought the hub in the first place. Now, no matter what I do, no matter how far back I try to do a system restore, the IRDA feature is not detectable by WinXP. It sees it as some Unsupported Device, and I have yet to figure out anything I can do to fix it and make the IRDA port come back. What a living hell. Long live the technological future.
709) You know, I uninstalled the suck-ass MS Photo Draw program from my machine a long time ago... and IE still has a menu item in the right-click menu for images saying "Open in MS Photo Draw." Yeah, great, genius, impressive.
708) Could the File Explorer be any more of a piece of crap? Notice that there is no way to close the hilighted folder! Whatever.
707) The ruler in MS Word has some tick marks which lead me to think that the tabbing alignment pointers can be moved to point along those marks. But, in fact, the set of places where Word will let me move the pointers is different from where the tick marks are. In some places they actually do line up, and I can have a pointer at a tick mark, but in plenty of places they don't. Seems completely and utterly broken to me.
706) Don't even get me started on the Archive UI in Outlook.
705) Apparently, there isn't a way in Outlook to see the contents of a folder in the date order you put stuff in there. So when I delete something old, it goes into my Deleted folder but by the date of the original email. Which means it is really hard to find something I just deleted but didn't want to. ^Z doesn't seem to do anything, either.
704) I have an optical MS Trackball Explorer. It has lots of buttons. I really only use two button functions: left click and right click. I'd actually like to assign right click to more than one button... but the Intellimouse control panel tells me that is verboten. Who can I slap, please? Repeatedly!
703) The XBox has two buttons on the front. One is a small one for the power, the other is a large one for opening the DVD/CD tray. What I think is doofy is that the tray button is the only one which lights up; I much more closely associate lighting with the power switch.
702) Why is it that, in this new Millennium, IE still can do the thing where I click on a link, things are spinning but nothing retrieved, I try to click on the Stop button and it won't listen? This is so pathetic.
701) I love how in Outlook is says "Drafts (1)" and then when I click on that folder to see the draft message, it says "There are no items to show in this view." Whatever.
700) In Outlook it tells me I can export as Comma Separated Values (Windows) or (MS-DOS), and it also lists Tab Separated Values (Windows) or (MS-DOS)... but nowhere does it explain what the bloody difference is between (Windows) and (MS-DOS). Hate!
699) Hey, I'm impressed: I bring up the Windows XP Pro Help and enter "screen shot". Not only does the entire Help app go out to lunch for three minutes before showing me anything (even a wait cursor), but there are no results. No results for "screen capture" either. Yay. So I enter "picture" and there finally is "Take a picture of what is on your screen." Whatever.
698) Could adding a new Contact in Outlook be more of a convoluted piece of crap? Blah. (Note: Had I discovered the "spreadsheet" view I might not have been in such hell. Well, except for the fact that e.g.: it doesn't give you a pop-up menu for the "File As" field.) Small examples (because the really broken things take too long to explain, because the UI is so convoluted):
1. The font is too small and there is no quick and obvious way to make it larger.
2. When I enter text in the Address field, it thinks I'm entering the city; it puts up the full Address dialog and has completely mangled whatever I've entered with no apparent rhyme or reason. It isn't using line breaks or anything sensible to put things into the dialog box's fields.
3. It annoys me that it puts up dialog boxes without any warning. So I'm trying to tab over somewhere to enter more data, and it puts up a dialog box (e.g.: for the Address, or for the Full Name). And then if I hit Esc or whatever, the cursor isn't in the destination field, but in the one I was trying to get out of in the first place.
And not only is the UI for entering stuff suck-ass-tastic, but after I enter a bunch of stuff I bring up the Address Book and there are no entries shown, no matter what Address List I select. (Yet when I search for a name it finds stuff I've entered, so the data is hidden somewhere.)
697) The IntelliPoint software has a tool to try and set the orientation of the input device. It works by letting you drag something vertically. That's fine, and seems to do an okay job there, but then when I move left and right, those aren't true horizontal. So I think they've only got half of the issue taken care of. Kinda sucks!
696) Genius. I'm doing an install over the network. It takes a loooong time to get the installer. Then, once I have it, it says there isn't enough room to install, and quits. Which means I have to pull it over the network again. And this is for official, brand-spanking-new, MS created software. Yes!
695) Maybe I'm using the wrong version of .Net or something, but the database access stuff is killing me. It is mostly okay, everything was fine... up until the point where I wanted to get the primary key of the table. It was marked as primary in Access, but the C# app said no pk existed. Turns out if I close Access completely so nothing is touching the database, then (and apparently only then) the C# app notices the pk. So. Where do I start the hurting?
694) Have you ever tried to add a network printer? What a bloody nightmare. It can't even do a partial name search. And after all that, it asks me if I want to use that printer as the default one and I say 'yes' and then when I get back to the Print dialog, the new printer I just added isn't selected. Even though I just said I want it to be the default printer. And, you'd figure that if I just went to all the trouble of adding it right there and then, that maybe it is because I want to actually print something to it!
693) I hate MS Access: I think that a UI for Find should default to the widest possible matching criteria, rather than the most restrictive.
692) Have I mentioned recently how much I hate MS Access? I enter a new record. It conflicts with another one based on primary key values. I cannot search for the other one because every time I try to do something, I get the dialog box telling me of the primary key conflict. So in order to resolve it, I apparently have to delete the row I just entered, find the old conflict, and re-enter the new one with the modification. If they just let me do stuff until time came to save, my life would be infinitely easier! Blah! (Further irony: I can't even select the row to delete - it gives me the stupid error dialog again.)
691) I think it is just peachy that you can get a sharing violation, quit whatever has the lock, and then still get the violation for another few minutes.
690) Apple describes some Windows problems, including the usual look of dialog boxes. In Windows, they tend to only say stuff like "OK" or "Cancel" rather than "Don't Save" - it is item number 9 in the Apple list, "Design Clear Dialogs." Mac dialog button labels are supposed to tell you what pressing the button will do. Much more clear, I think. Anyway, I think one of the reasons crappy dialogs exist in Windows is that the standard MFC utility call ::MessageBox() doesn't let you set the text of the buttons it puts up. You are restricted to choosing from a set of pre-defined dialog boxes. The things you can change are stupid things like the icons. Big whoop-de-doo, that'll really clarify stuff for the user!
689) A network machine is down. I have a drive letter mapped to a folder on it. Whenever I try to use the Open File dialog, the pop-up menu that lists my machine folder hierarchy causes the app to lock up. Now that's what the Danes call quality!
688) Save As... in Outlook has various formats, but explicitly does not have HTML. Whatever.
687) I really like the size of the xbox controllers. (I'm over 30, BTW.) They might seem odd at first, but now the Dreamcast controllers feel really bad and carpel tunnel inducing.
686) There is no Search and Replace when composing a new message in Outlook. This. Is. Insane.
685) If a file is being read by a process (only read, mind you) apparently no other process can read it. That is sheer genius.
684) I'd really like it if MS could come up with yet another completely different implementation of the expletive menu bar for their programs. Oh, wait, they did with VS7. Kill, kill, killy kill kill. If VS doesn't have focus, and I click on the File menu there, the app gets focus and the "File" is hilighted. If I move my mouse away the hilighting goes away. However, if I don't move the mouse away but instead click again, the File stays hilighted. No menu appears, however. When I move the mouse away, the hilight stays. So I'm patiently waiting for the menu to appear and it never does. Whatever! What! Ever! Whatever! In IE, as soon as you click on the File menu, even if the app doesn't already have focus, the app gets focus and the menu appears immediately. Inconsistency is apparently the last refuge of the weak and the insecure.
683) I want to be able to tell all of Windows to always default to "All Files" in any Open dialog. Gah!
682) MS has a habit of putting too many little tweaky things in their UI buttons. The little arrow on the IE Back button might seem nifty, but then you get little tabs for moving tool bars and you get little arrows for choosing how to Open a file (as text, as binary, etc), and the chances are ever increasing that some day you will want to do one thing by clicking, and because the mouse pointer is off by a few pixels, something entirely different will happen. I. Really. Hate. That.
681) I get email. It has an image attachment. I'm reading it in Outlook. I double-click on the image. It asks me if I want to open it or save it. I say that I want to open it. It then gives me an error dialog which says something like "cannot find the specified path." It doesn't say what path, nor does it offer me any way to fix the thing now, or for the future. I. Hate.
680) Frames suck. Iframes suck. The fact that a frame can still be loading and neither the mouse cursor nor the spinning icon are showing any activity sucks. Argh!
679) I hate how when you empty the Recycle Bin it asks you e.g.: if you are sure that you want to delete these 9 items, but then doesn't give you any information about what the 9 items are.
678) Feel the love. I've got 2 cd units in a machine. One is a reader, the other is also a writer. They show up in the File Explorer as G: and H:. I'm not sure which is which. There isn't any information displayed in the Explorer to tell me. So I right-click on one of them in the hopes of seeing info like the name of the manufacturer (which I know enough from to determine which is which). So in the Properties dialog I click on Hardware... and it shows me a list of all drives, with no information about what letter they are mounted as, rather than just showing me information like the drive letter for the single item I right-clicked on to get Properties in the first place. Yay!
677) Is it just me, or is Outlook a piece of crap? Especially when it comes to how you set up rules for filtering email? I get email with a subject line like "Version7.3 Serial Number 74B Report" and I want to filter those out. Well, at the very least I want it to ignore the serial number because that changes every time. But the "wizard" I get when I right-click on the message to set up refiling rules is designed to make it as annoying as possible for me to be able to do that, apparently. It wants to treat things I enter as full strings rather than as a set of words to require. In other words instead of doing "foo bar" it should be doing "foo (logical-and) bar." Boy, I hate.
676) It pisses me off that only some things support Ctrl-BackSpace to delete the entire previous word.
675) Once again, my mind is blown. Apparently, when you use FindFirstFile() and you get a valid file handle back, that file handle doesn't work as-is with e.g.: ReadFile(). I had to construct another new file handle that included the path all over again. What is the bloody point of getting back a file handle that doesn't work from FindFirstFile()?
674) Is it me, or can you not use a doskey that you defined previously in the same batch file inside another doskey definition? I'm so glad to be stuck using this crap.
673) Why does the so-called Advanced Find in Outlook not support regexps? I mean, what is so advanced about that?
672) For the most part, I want to really hurt people who implement click-to-select-text as one-click- selects-the-whole-text rather than having it just set the insertion point, and having double clicking do either a word or the whole field. (Preferably triple clicking doing the whole field, personally).
671) The volume controls (at least in Win2K) are already a complete piece of confusing over complicated crap, yet the system doesn't support something that I want. See, I'm playing some ripped audio files (yes, from CDs that I myself own, okay?) and I'd like to not hear the system dings over the music. But both are being generated by the sound card. There is no way to tell the system to turn down the volume of beeps separate from the music. Blah! Blah, I say!
670) xcopy has a way to tell it to assume that what you are copying is a directory. I don't see a way to tell it to assume it is a file. So you get the prompt. Which makes automated building not work so well. Which makes me hate.
669) This is great. Every time I try to do a Search in the File Explorer now, the new Search window is created beneath the Explorer window. So all I visibly get is an entry in the Task Bar that is flashing. I have no earthly idea how/why this happens, but it sure is annoying! "New, Windows 2000, now 16.3% more annoying!"
668) The "working" animation in IE is bad because it relies on the user looking at it for a minimum length of time to see the animation. If you just glance at it you don't see anything moving. Worse, the animation includes the non-animated image. That means if you glance at the animation while it is showing the frames which match the non-animated mode, it looks like it is not doing anything.
667) I'm trying to set permissions on a file on NTFS. I click that I want to deny "Modify" and suddenly the check box for "Deny Read" gets checked as well! What the hell has reading something got to do with modifying it? I could understand it modifying some metadata about the file, but it sure as hell shouldn't be modifying the file contents themselves. My lord in heaven, I don't need this kind of crap when I'm stuck at work at quarter to eleven on a bloody Saturday night. Hell!
666) What would be so expletive hard about telling me what bloody process has a lock on a file or folder when I'm trying to e.g.: delete it? So I could figure out what to close? Can I hate the Windows FS more?
665) Argh! Apparently, if you have a leading space in a path like " //foomaching/file", it will not be usable by e.g.: the File Open dialog. Blah blah blah!
664) If you have a network shared folder (something like \\foomachine\folder for example) it seems that if you are looking at the machine it is on (\\foomachine) you are shown the folder, but the right-click menu does not have the Copy command in it. At all. What. Ever.
663) Maybe I've mentioned this before, but... It would be nice if I could save the results of a file system search, you know? Like, it is just text. Just automatically store one or two of them for me, okay?
662) I just want things in the TaskBar to be assigned locations. So if I open Outlook later, it will be put in the same old place. So I don't have to go hunting for it. Argh! I mean, for how long have we had the stupid Task Bar and it doesn't even let you rearrange things by hand.
661) IE is just senile. It forgets what my home page is all the time. Then, I just started noticing that it screws up the ordering of things in my Links toolbar. Like, it rearranges them! Whatever!
660) Why doesn't the File Explorer just always resize the columns in the details view as if I double-clicked on their separators? That's the behaviour I want. Blah.
659) In the File Explorer, I'm looking at things in the Detail mode, sorted with the most recently updated files first. I create a new folder. I refresh. The folder still isn't at the top of the list, it is always at the bottom. Yeah, that makes sense. Whatever!
658) I go to disconnect a network mapped drive. It tells me that I have something open in there and that I shouldn't disconnect. Turns out it was just that I had that folder selected in the File Explorer, so the contents of the folder were showing in the right-hand pane. I so completely hate this crap.
657) When a program can't write to the disk because it is full, why can't it just figure that out and just say so? Instead I get error messages like "something might have happened, including running out of disk space, but who really knows?"
656) Why does it take so long to delete (move to the Recycle Bin) a file? Shouldn't it just be setting some bit in some table? Blah.
655) Apparently, in Word's Outline mode you aren't allowed to use the Ruler to e.g.: give yourself more or less room for text horizontally. So you have to put up with whatever wrapping it does, even if you have tons of horizontal screen space. Yay.
654) Have I mentioned recently how much I hate Outlook? I select some text, I go to the Format menu, which has options to change the selected text, I choose Plain Text and... the whole message changes, not just the area I selected. Yes, there is the warning dialog box. I just think it is sorta annoying to mix things together that either work on selections, or only work on your whole damned message.
653) I like how apparently Command Windows in Windows are restricted to being no wider than 80 columns. Where do we start the torture?
652) What is the point of the file Search letting you search for text in files, if it doesn't show you the actual lines in the files containing the text?
651) When I try to do a Search for files containing "!define", it fails, telling me something about the volume not being indexed. The error is bullpoop because if I remove the '!' then the search works. Whatever. How much were people paid to make this?
650) I start a batch file. I hit Ctrl-c. It says "Terminate batch job (y/n)?" so I type 'n' and... it exits the batch. Yes!
649) When I'm uninstalling software, sometimes it is because I'm trying to make room on my drives for new stuff. So it would be nice if the Add/Remove programs UI would tell me where something resided - which partition - so I'd know if it would help any to get rid of it. I mean, duh!
648) I'm trying to share a folder. I'm trying to add a user and set permissions for them. I type the name in the "Select Users, Computers, or Groups" dialog and hit OK, and the hourglass cursor comes up... and never goes away. There is no status reported anywhere, no clues as to what is frozen. This is quality software and usability!
647) Is it IE? Is it the web server? Pages with dynamic content and/or frames are shown as being fully loaded by IE but they are blank... and then eventually the data for them comes in. I so completely hate the Web as User Interface. It is like three bazillion trillion steps backward from where we were before everybody went for Web Apps. God, hell.
646) Once you discover the feature, the "Enable/Disable Selected Tracks" ability of Windows Media Player is nice to have available.
645) If you get a message in Outlook and it has an image in it, then when you use the mouse wheel to scroll down it does this annoying thing where it will sort of "fast forward" over the image, rather than scrolling through the image at the same rate it scrolls through text. I really dislike that, and I don't understand what kind of person would think that it was a good idea after like five seconds of usability testing.
644) I think the Search for files from the File Explorer, etc. is kinda lame in that it doesn't let you pause a search. If you tell it to stop, you can't then continue, you have to rerun the whole thing from the beginning. That's a pain when you are doing a big search - things get poky while it is searching, so it is sometimes nice to stop the search when it looks like it has a match worth investigating. If that file turns out to not be the one you really want, you have to then rerun the search in its entirety. Sucks.
643) That insanely annoying little menu that appears when you paste text into an Office XP application, asking you if you want the original or plain-text formatting, doesn't have a way for me to set the default value. So it is pretty consistently doing the wrong thing, and I have to change it every time I paste. Hate!
642) I'm looking at some large spreadsheet in Excel. I bring up the Find and Replace dialog to search for a cell containing some specific text. It apparently finds it because the scroll position in the overall spreadsheet changes, but I don't see anything that is clearly the hit. Turns out the selection/cursor is just an outline, and isn't bold at all. Normally, cell selection outlines are bold. I have no idea what is going on, I just know I completely hate Excel right now.
641) Someone sends me email, I'm reading it in Outlook XP. The email contains some hyperlinks. If I click on one, it brings up IE and loads the data. However, if I right-click on one, there is no "Copy Shortcut" in the menu. This. Is. The. Future.
640) Say you are trying to look at 2 files to see if they are the same. So you think maybe I'll try looking at their Properties because that shows me their real size. So I have the File Explorer open, full screen, and right-click on the first file and bring up its Properties. Okay. Then, I right-click on the second file... and now the first Properties dialog disappears because the File Explorer, which is maximized, comes to the front. The kicker is that the Properties dialog doesn't appear in the Task Bar.
639) I'm trying to play a relaxing video game (the kind where you blow lots of things up in a hurry) and while I'm pounding on the fire key, which happens to be the left shift key, this stupid bloody Sticky Keys dialog comes up over everything, and I instantly die and die and die. Where can I start the real slapping of heads? I hate everyone.
638) There's crap in my Tray that I wanna get rid of (e.g.: Real Player Start Center). I wish I could just right-click on/in the Tray somehow and get a menu that would have entries that would let me edit what is in the Tray. Direct manipulation rather than figuring out whatever evil convoluted thing is going on that puts stuff in the Tray, you know? This extends to just about everything - if I can see it, I should be able to right-click and immediately get the controls for it.
637) I finally figured out what it is exactly that sucks so incredibly much about the WinXP Start menu. I've always felt the hate for it, but hadn't really put into words what was wrong with it and why it was so bloody stupid and frustrating... the reason is the fact that it is two columns wide, and things in the left column can be hierarchical (like the All Programs entry), and the submenu then obscures the things in the right column. And that is really annoying because if you want to then get to something in the right column, you can't just point to it, you have to first go back and make the huge list of programs go away.
636) The File Explorer is such a complete turd. It constantly explodes when network mounted directories go away.
635) I have a new machine and I want to move over to using it. Do you have any idea how much of a completely pain in the ass this is? Take, for example, Outlook: does it give me a way to just magically burn a CD and use that to teleport my world over to the new machine? No. I mean, isn't there supposed to be a big desire on the part of hardware and software companies for people to keep buying new machines? If that's the case, you'd think they'd want to make it as easy as possible. Like, Office (or, better yet, Windows itself) should just a dialog box that is just a field for entering the name of the target machine to copy over to, and it should just go do it.
634) I've got a new Dell, with super Xeon processors, running the latest version of Windows XP. I swear, IE still does this thing where it is loading a page, and I click on a link, and it make the "you've clicked on a link" sound and yet it never starts going where I clicked. The windows spinner isn't spinning. So then I have to click again.
633) Outlook's appointment UI is bothering me. When you get an invitation to one it lets you Accept, Decline or be Tentative. When I want to later delete some long-recurring meeting that I will no longer attend, it still talks in those terms. But personally I'm just thinking that I want to "Delete" the thing. I guess it is trying to be nice and force me to tell the person running the meeting that I'm opting out or something, but the terminology of it all just bugs me.
632) I have a machine with XP on it. It tells me I have yet to Activate it. I do some other stuff. Then I want to activate it. There's nothing obvious to use to activate it. So I go to the Microsoft web site and enter something like "Windows XP Activation" which does get me results, but they are all long screeds trying to convince me that I should love Activation, yadda yadda yadda, but never just having some link that actually starts the bloody activation process. So then I turn to the local Help on the PC and it tells me that I have to use some Activation thing in the System Tools. It doesn't offer me any button that will just fire up the stupid Activation thing, instead it gives me some long winded explanation of how to navigate my way through the Start menu to the stupid thing. You'd think, given how anal MS is being about all this activation crap, they'd set it up to, like, be more straight-forward? You know, lowering the barriers? Whatever.
631) I'm composing email in Outlook XP, and I have some text that reads "foo bar." and when I try to select the so I can delete it, the bloody selection insists on automatically extending to include the immediately preceding punctuation. Where, exactly, can I start the slapping?
630) In Outlook XP, if you have your inbox sorted so the most recent email is last, it works fine because the selection of the current message really likes to march down. So if you'd rather then have the mail sorted so the most recent is first, it completely sucks huge hairy spheres of poop.
629) I just used the Picture Resizer in the File Explorer in WinXP. So far, it actually pretty much rules.
628) Speaking strictly from a user's perspective, I wish the Task Manager was more useful. I've got a DOS window, er I mean "Command Prompt" window, open and it is doing stuff. I'd like to be able to go into the Task Manager and make the priority of that shell and any of its child processes be reduced (in the sense of made less important). But I have other DOS windows open with the same name, so I can't even tell which one in the Task Manager is the one I want, let alone there being a simple GUI way for me to alter the priorities like I want, I believe.
627) Outlook XP is blocking attachments. So I want to allow them (I know, I know). The Options control panel has a Security tab, and in there you can pick the security zone which defines all the security settings. Apparently, they are the same zones as used by IE. What sucks ass is that the menu only lists two out of the four zones that exist in IE. So apparently I cannot choose one of my intermediate zones.
626) I'm listening to a CD via the Windows Media Player thing. I want to skip to a particular track. So I double-click on it. Instead of taking me there, suddenly I'm in "hey, edit the name of the track" mode since I clicked on the name of the track. Now, riddle me this: how much more often do you think you'd just be wanting to go to a particular track when you click on it, more than you'd be wanting to change it's name? Particularly when it is a song on a CD and it's not as if you can change what is on the CD for cryin' out loud!
625) Huh? In the File Explorer, say you are looking at a directory (it is in the hierarchy in the left pane, and the contents of it are in the right pane). Then you type an http web address in, e.g.: www.yahoo.com and the right panel now shows the Yahoo! page. But the left panel still shows your Folders, mind you. So then you want to go back to looking at the original directory. You click on it in the left panel and... nothing happens. Well, maybe the name of the directory becomes editable, but the right pane certainly doesn't show you the contents of the directory. Turns out you have to click on a different directory to get the right panel to update and start showing you file system stuff again. Whatever.
624) I run a program which creates a directory. I go look at the parent directory in the File Explorer. The new child directory doesn't appear in the left panel when I open up the parent one there. Even if I do View / Refresh. However, if I click on the parent one to see what is in it, lo and behold the child directory is there. What. Ever.
623) I really hate the way Outlook handles fonts. The problem is that it is lacking an entry in the font related menus that is a default. I certainly don't know the name of the default font, so then when I paste something in and it is in a new font that I don't want, and I need to change it, I don't really know what I'm supposed to change it to w/out first laboriously manually examining the font settings for other text.
622) Just like in IE 5, In Outlook when you go to delete a folder it says something like "are you sure you want to remove the folder 'X' and move all its contents to the Recycle Bin?" even if the folder is empty, so I'm left there all worried that maybe I haven't actually already copied out important stuff. It's utterly stupid! Argh!
621) Just tell me where I can start slapping some people upside the head, right? It used to be that in Open File dialogs you could type something like *txt in the "File name" field and you'd see a list of files ending in 'txt'. This doesn't happen, at all, in VS7, or Outlook XP - I guess it is something about the XP version of the Office components? Like, when the "Filename" field is blank I can see all the files, including the ones ending in '.txt', but then when I type '*txt' info the "Field name" field, I get nothing but directory folders shown. What. The. Hell. If there is something which starts with txt it will appear. This. Is. Insane! Oh, also, if you type '*.txt' with the explicit '.' in there, then it will work. Argh!
620) I have a ton of email in my Outlook inbox that I want to filter into folders. I created the rule, and now I want to run it over the stuff in my inbox. It looks like, however, I cannot do that. You can define a rule interactively from the Tools / Organize command, and have it run through your mailbox and then have the rule saved off, but it would appear that if you've already defined the rule you can't manually run it. So I used the Organize command and now I have 2 rules that are the same, so I have to go delete the one I already have. Whatever. Oh, wait!!! When going to delete the extra rules, I see there is a "Run Now..." button on the Rules Wizard modal dialog box. So I guess the functionality is there, it is just not in the right places. Double whatever.
619) I'm trying to add a Rule to Outlook. I want to file stuff based on who it is from. The reason I want to do that is that my inbox is being flooded with a messages from a particular source. So the problem is that I'm in the Rules Wizard, and it turns out to be modal which means I can't go look at the email messages I've got in my inbox to copy the name of the sender, to paste into the new rule. Genius. I hate everybody.
618) Wow. The Trackball story just gets better. So I go to the MS website and try to lookup any FAQs or KB articles. I don't really find anything super useful (there's a couple, but they just say "use a different KVM" so that's great). I end up going through to the Microsoft Online Assisted Support. It asks me to choose what kind of thing I'm wanting help on. I look through the list and the only thing vaguely fitting is "Hardware" (everything else in the list is software I think, and there certainly isn't anything about trackballs anywhere). So then I am asked to enter a Product ID which is on the bottom of the trackball. I do that, and then the system tells me that "The Product ID number you entered is for Trackball Explorer PS2/USB which is different than the product you selected for support. You may enter the Product ID number for Hardware or go back and choose another support option or product." And doesn't let me go any further in the submission process. And "Trackball Explorer" doesn't appear anywhere in the original list. Either they are being complete idiots or they are effectively saying that they do not give any support for these products. I wish they would just come out with it if that is the case - just say it plainly so I'm not left trying to wrangle their piece of crap web site into taking a (free - I'm certainly not paying if this is the level of their support capability and helpfulness already) submission. If they do have some support for the product, why don't they just put me directly into the correct category when I enter the Product ID? Why, for that matter, if they require the Product ID do I have to pick any category to begin with at all? They obviously can already figure out what the hell it is from the Product ID. Turns out if I choose the category "MS Mouse" then it works. This. Is. Pathetic!
617) Could the IntelliPoint stuff suck any harder? It fails to recognize my MS trackball as such a lot of the time, and then it lets you map everything to, say, right-click but then when you OK or Accept only then does it tell you that you can only have one button ever mapped to right-click. I don't see why there has to be that bloody restriction in the first place, really. Give. Me. Strength.
616) I have a Trackball Explorer from MS. I actually don't completely hate it. It is probably the best mouse-type input device I've ever used. However, it all falls down when it comes to actually using it under certain circumstances. Specifically, if I try to use it as a PS/2 device rather than a USB one, with a KVM box ("well, there's your problem!"), I get into a world of hurt. The IntelliPoint driver tends to not recognize the trackball as such (it defaults to some generic MS mouse), and I have to tell it explicitly that's what it is. But even when I do that, it can only see the first two buttons. Sure, it will let me map the others, but when I click them nothing actually ever happens. So I'm reduced to using the first two of four. Pretty pathetic, really. For sure the KVM is complicit in all this - plugging the trackball directly into the machine's PS/2 port works!
615) I love how MS likes to make it as difficult as possible to get into Safe Mode or whatever. Like, they don't tell you the magic key. And then they keep changing it from OS to OS. And then they only give you a split second to read the really long statement ("To enter into diagnostics and blah blah blah mode, press the blah key") so that by the time you've read it all to find out what key to press, the bloody machine has already started doing its regular bloody boot process. Bloody hell!
614) So much for Word XP's AutoCorrect. It did change a '-' into a dash for me at one point, which I think I actually benefited from, but now (and I've changed no options) it adamantly refuses to do it ever again. I looked in the options and apparently I've got it set to change '--' to a dash, but when I type '--' and then a space and then other stuff, nothing happens. Also, there isn't anything when I right-click on the '--'. I think there should be a menu entry to AutoCorrect it. Whatever. Ass-backward poopy heads, all of 'em.
613) So I'm biting the bullet and upgrading a machine from Win2K to WinXP. I'm told that you cannot upgrade a Win2K Workstation installation. So I need to know what version of Win2K I'm running, right? So I bring up the System Properties and it only tells me that I'm running Win2K - it doesn't tell me what kind of Win2K. Do I have to like reboot entirely to find out or something? I mean, what the bloody hell? (Update: so I go to logout in the hopes that the login splash screen would say, and notice that the Start menu's fancy title includes "Server" and the banner graphic for the Shut Down dialog also says "Server". Kinda odd that there can be all sorts of fancy graphics telling me, but the one place that you are supposed to go to to find out the details of your System Properties doesn't say jack squat.)
612) I really dislike UIs like the Add/Remove Programs control panel in Win2K because it pretty much forces you to always have something selected in the list of programs, and the one that is selected is super hilighted and takes up lots of space and it just annoying when you are just trying to peruse the list. It would be better if it had a hierarchical list like the File Explorer or something, so everything could be closed up.
611) Word can underline things it things you have misspelled. That's actually not a horrible feature. Outlook, on the other hand, can only AutoCorrect as you type which I think ruins the educational benefits. Pisses me off.
610) I'm dying. My machine is rotting. The dual monitor thing is making it crash, er I mean completely wedge lock up die die die whenever there is any image in any Office XP application. (It used to only do that if I tried watching a flick e.g.: in Windows Media Player.)
609) It is pretty funny what Win2K does with my desktop icons when I toggle the 2nd display enablement. It seems to pretty much put them in a completely different place every time. Uh, yeah.
608) It pisses me off that the File Explorer completely forgets my settings for a folder I'm viewing. Like, I view it in Details mode and then I double-click on the column header separators to make each column the proper width, and everything looks great, but then the next time I come back to the folder it has forgotten the settings and everything looks like crap again. (It at least does this across Shut Downs, if not Log Outs.)
607) MS Word XP is killing me. I want to turn off the Status Bar. So I go look in the View menu... no luck. The help text says that I have to navigate through Tools / Options / View / Show / Status Bar. Okayyyy... While we're at it, why don't we put File New, Open and Save under completely different hierarchies, as well? Oh, yeah, so then I turn off the Status Bar in one window of Word, but none of the other ones I've got open are updated. Wow, according to the Task Manager, I guess I've actually got like three different entire instances of the entire Word application going here. Nice!
606) I want to be able to right-click on the time in the Task Bar / Shelf thingy and have a Copy command so I can copy the date out as text for pasting into other documents. Dangit.
605) This is pretty precious: I've got an MS Trackball Explorer which I like well enough. It has four buttons on it, not including the fact that you can press the scroll wheel like a button. It comes with the IntelliPoint control panel / drivers. So I've got all these buttons, right? So I'm using Wings3d which expects there to be a three button mouse, right? Well, there is apparently no such mapping available in the IntelliPoint software. So even though I've got a mouse with enough buttons, there isn't any way to activate them appropriately. Yes!
604) IE 6 or something has an option to force images to fit into the size of the browser window. It will scale them down. However, there is no UI thing to let you see it at full size once you have that option on. That really sucks. Like, there should be something in the right-click menu, dammit.
603) In Outlook, you can do this thing where you drag one of the columns into an area on top of the frame that says "Drag a column header here to group by that column", and things get grouped by that (if you know what I'm talking about you know, if not, it is kinda hard to explain). Anyway, it is nice and all, but what I don't understand is why you can't do that in some folders. E.g.: any archived folders.
602) Maybe it exists, but I haven't found it: I want Outlook to find any replies to a message I have received, but have refiled somewhere so I can't find them.
601) GUIs suck. Especially Microsoft GUIs. Like, I want to copy file foo from directory a/ to directory b/, which already has a foo in it. When I paste it, my only option is to cancel the procedure or overwrite the file. There is no option of editing the pasted name, which is what I want.
600) Outlook just gets better every day: If I compose a new message in Outlook, the new message window isn't modal. However, if I use WinZip's "zip and email" thing to bring up a new message with the zip file, then it is modal - I cannot do anything else in Outlook until I'm done with that draft message. Uh huh. Whatever.
599) A nice example of engineer-based UI, rather than human-centric UI: in Outlook, once things are archived they no longer appear in the folder they came from, and you can't even search both at the same time. Really, they should be presented to the user as the same thing, with an extra tag saying if something is archived or on the server, should anybody ever care to know.
598) One of those days. I don't know if I should laugh or cry. If I weren't trying to get some work done maybe I'd have the ability to laugh. I was, unfortunately, forced to upgrade to Outlook XP (in fact, to Office XP). I copy text from the Address field of IE. It should pretty much just be text, I'd think. I paste it into a message I'm composing in Outlook. It magically turns it into a blue underlined URL looking thing. That's okay at the moment, anyway. But now, with Office XP, there is a little widget next to the text I just pasted that appears on top of the text of the rest of the message. It is a floating menu that has 2 options, about if I want the pasted text to retain the source formatting, or to just be plain text (presumably with no formatting). Anyway, the point is that the stupid thing is covering up other text in my message and will not go away. There isn't e.g.: any little "x" close box on the thing. This is insane. It must have explicitly been designed to drive people like myself to acts of wanton destruction.
597) I sure am glad that they went to all the trouble of making Outlook XP have fancy new style menus, but failed to make the scroll bars update as you are dragging them. Because new style menus make my life so much better than being able to see where the hell I am. Shyeah, right.
596) I have no mouth and I must scream. Or something like that. Anyway, why is it that when I click on, for example, IE's entry in the Task Bar, I can make the window Minimize and Restore, but if I do the same thing on Outlook XP's entry in the Task Bar, it never Minimizes? Could they bloody well at least just bloody agree on what the bloody hell their bloody software is doing to bloody well do? Update: today, it will minimize when I click on it again. Heaven only knows what it will do tomorrow. Yay.
595) I'm trying to modify the "Trusted Sites" list in IE. I type in something and Add it. Then, I notice that I mistyped the item. So I'd like to just directly edit the item I added. Well, I can't. Instead, I have to type in the whole item all over again and Add it. And then delete the previous attempt that was misspelled. Now that's a quality user interface.
594) There's a scrolling list HTML form item on a web page I'm looking at in IE. I want to copy text of one of the entries from that list so I can paste it elsewhere. I can't. Copy doesn't work. Yes!
593) Okay, riddle me this, Batman: why does the Win2K Task Manager have a minimum vertical size? What if I only want to see the top three processes? This is pathetic!. If the rationale is that the Performance page needs a minimum height to draw stuff in, then I say if someone makes the enclosing window shorter then the Performance page should just get a scroll bar. Not exactly rocket science, here.
592) This is one of the more impressive things that MS has done to me recently: my laptop keeps telling me there are critical updates i have to apply, yet when I bring up IE to start the update process, it completely wedges. For like five minutes. And then it tells me I'm seriously hosed. I mean, getting critical updates sure is a good time for a system to fail. Very reassuring. (The kicker is that the problem seemed to be that I was going through an HTTP proxy. Turning that off made things work, yet that solution wasn't ever mentioned in the list of helpful hints. Yay.)
591) Wheel mice are nice and everything, but... In some windows, I want the wheel to scroll a lot of lines (because they are tall) and in others I want it to scroll maybe one line at a time (because the window is only a few lines high). So I guess I could tell the Mouse Control Panel that I want the wheel to scroll by a certain percentage of the size of the window, rather than by a fixed number of lines or pages. Blah.
590) I get email in Outlook that contains URLs. I can click on them in the message I received to bring up the info in IE. So then I reply to the message, which brings up the composition window for the reply message, and I see that the things which are URLs are blue and underlined, but they aren't actual active hyperlinks; clicking on them doesn't make anything happen... Sweet.
589) I tried ripping some mp3's on my WindowsXP box. Boy, that was successful!
588) Is it me? In WinXP, in the File Explorer, in the Details view, there doesn't seem to be a way to make it always calculate and show folder sizes. You have to hover over them and get the information from the tool-tip. That's pretty impressively pathetic.
587) In WinXP, I hit Alt-Tab and the display it has to bring up is really slow and half the time it doesn't switch to the next thing, it only stays on the app I'm already on. Like, that's such an improvement? What, I need a bloody Pentium 4 just to use Alt-Tab? Could I hate Windows more?
586) In Win2K I'm looking at some files using the Thumbnail view in the File Explorer. I click on something to select it and then scroll down and Shift-click something else, and instead of getting everything in-between I get a region selection as if I had used Alt-click. Whatever.
585) I'm in Outlook reading my mail. I get a piece of email that has the little paper clip attachment icon with it, yet there are no attachments that I can find in the actual email. Nothing in the body, nothing in the header bar area. Just nothing. If I try double-clicking on the paper clip icon itself it just brings up the whole email message. So still no attachment found. Whatever. Piece of crap.
584) So I have to uninstall IE6. I go to the Control Panels, to Add/Remove Programs, find IE6 and click the Change/Remove button. A dialog box comes up with three radio button options. The first is grayed out, the second is for repairing IE, and the last one says something like "Restore previous Windows configuration." Which I find really completely stupid and annoying. I mean, to me, that sounds like I already removed something and want to bring it back, you know? It should just bloody say "Remove IE6". Whatever.
583) I just got a dialog box in Outlook when I was trying to copy something. It told me that Outlook can only hold 12 things and that by copying the new one I'd be discarding the 1st one, the oldest one, and was that OK? There are just so many things wrong with this scenario that it is almost funny. I mean, first of all, why 12? That is completely arbitrary and meaningless to the user. I'm sure Alan Cooper would have a field day with this kind of tripe. Secondly, it is news to me that there are 12 things because when I go to paste something I apparently can only get the last one, the one I just copied. I have never had any inkling that I could choose which of the previous 12 things to paste. I mean, what in the hell are these people thinking? Whatever, just "ship it!", I guess.
582) I'm composing a reply to a message in Outlook. The original and excerpted message is pretty long, so I'd like to split the window horizontally so I can type in one view and read the excerpt in the other. But, nooooo, Outlook's composition window doesn't support splits. Terrific.
581) I have the Favorites showing as a pane in IE. I right-click on a bookmark in there, but there isn't any command to open it in a new window. Yay.
580) I know I should just never use MS PhotoDraw since it is such an insane piece of crap, but I do. I'm bad. The latest is that when you are resizing an image (found through the "Crop Size" command, which seems very very strange to me), you can choose your measurements e.g.: cm or mm or inches or pixels. What is blatantly missing is to change things based on percentage of original size. Lame.
579) I'm reading some email in Outlook. The message contains an URL which is an active link I can click on in Outlook, which brings up IE to load that URL. Unfortunately, it is for a PDF document, and my installation of IE and the Acrobat plug-in is broken so I don't get anything useful. So then I try to right-click on the link in Outlook so I can choose Save As... only to discover there ain't no such thing in Outlook. Yay.
578) IE5.1 on my iBook can warn you when you are entering or leaving a secure web page. What sucks is that if you go from one secure page to another on the same site, like when making some purchase, it puts up the dialog on every page. Brilliant.
577) IE5.1 on my iBook is still killing me. When you do Shift-Tab it selects the whole previous field's data, which I've always considered wrong because 9 times out of 10 I just want to edit the last few letters, and then to add insult to injury the field doesn't respond to Fn-Right Arrow which is really supposed to be End. Great. Genius. Ship it!
576) OS X IE5.1 doesn't always load images. It might load like half of them and then I have to go to the View menu and tell it to explicitly Load Images. Whatever.
575) Dunno if it is OS X or IE, but in IE5.1 on my iBook when I click on links, about 25% of the time it completely doesn't do anything or go anywhere, and I have to click again. What the heck is up with that?
574) Outlook is too modal. I'm looking for the "Out of the Office Assistant" and apparently it doesn't show up when in the Calendar mode. Only when in the email mode. Great.
573) Whenever I start IE on my work machine, the window is tall and narrow. I want it to start out maximized. What seems to have worked in the past is to maximize IE and then quit it; I think that whatever size the last closing IE window was is the size it will be when you next start. That's my voodoo belief, anyway. Of course, today, that completely and utterly doesn't work and IE will only start tall and narrow, and obstinately refuses to do anything else. (So I went through and deleted everything IE cached that I could - documents, cookies, etc., and that seemed to fix it. Similar things happen like my home page URL getting reset randomly. Pretty much it seems like IE just freaks out when it has pooped too much in its own home.)
572) IE 5.1 on my iBook running OSX doesn't remember where you were scrolled to when you go back. Sucks.
571) IE 5.1 on my iBook running OSX has a problem: I mouse-down over a link and wait for the extra commands dialog to come up, but nothing happens. But then if I move the mouse pointer like even one pixel, suddenly the menu comes up. Dunno if this is OSX being completely stupid, or IE. It sucks because there is a certain amount of time you need to hold down the mouse button for the menu to come up, but it doesn't come up so I don't know how long to wait before moving the mouse to get it (because moving the mouse before that time is up will mean you won't ever get the menu, as far as I can tell).
570) Office for Mac OSX is still completely stupid. I go to save a file as text and up comes a dialog saying that the file either is password protected or has special formatting, which will be lost, and asking me if I wish to continue. I do not comprehend how anybody who works on the umpteenth version of Word doesn't know that such dialog boxes suck ass. (Especially because I know for certain that the document wasn't password protected.)
569) XP has gone and made Alt-Tab show some fancy-pants thumbnails of the various apps. Unfortunately, it is kinda slow so on my dual Celeron 466 machine (stop laughing) I can hit Alt-Tab and what happens is that I don't actually get switched to the next window, but the rendering of the Alt-Tab temporary dialog sorta happens and then doesn't undraw properly and so all I get is smutch on the screen. Sorta pathetic, really.
568) MS Word sucks in so many ways, but the two things I'd like to hilight right now are that first you cannot have disjoint selections, which I think would turn some repetitive and annoying tasks into pretty simple and quick ones, and second it just seems to go insane and change the indentation of everything all the time. Like, if I hit delete one too many times at the start of a line, all bets are off. I'm sure it is all internally consistent and everything, but from the users perspective it is basically just officially Really Completely Stupid and Annoying. Hate.
567) Trying to schedule a meeting using Outlook is, well, nightmarish. The "Plan a Meeting" dialog box has tons of information in it and yet:
1. It doesn't even have a maximize title bar button.
2. You can't resize the horizontal space for Attendee names.
Then you get to the actual "New Meeting" thing. It is strange in that if you resize it to be smaller horizontally, at some point it stops bothering to keep all the text visible. Like, the scroll bar just disappears and as you type, the text being entered goes off the right hand edge of the window into never never land.
566) Okay. I guess I'm learning that I should never use the Calendar in Outlook. I'm looking at the "Outlook Today" shortcut which shows me a list of meetings. I can click on the meeting to bring up the super insane in-your-face-with-too-much-UI view of the meeting. But all I want to do is delete the meeting. When I want to delete a message, all I have to do is right-click on it and choose the 'Delete' command. But when I right-click on a meeting, I don't get any menu at all. So then I click on the Edit menu to try and hunt for a 'Delete' command in the menus. That's okay, except for when I move the mouse along to look in the various menus (View, Favorites, Tools, etc.) and find that when the mouse cursor goes over the Favorites menu, Outlook completely locks up. For like literally seven seconds. And then the Favorites menu appears finally. As if that makes any sense. (Eventually I figure out that you can bring up the insane UI for the meeting and there's a 'Cancel Meeting' command. Why they couldn't have it be analogous to mail and just have 'Delete', I do not know. Whatever.)
565) When you get a Meeting Request in Outlook, it doesn't automatically warn you of scheduling conflicts. In any way. Not even a little icon or anything. I think that is pretty much stupid.
564) My machine says it is 2:21pm. I create a new Meeting Request in Outlook for 2:30-3:30pm. When I try to send it, I get another completely insane stupid broken asinine freakish dialog. What the heck does it mean? Why does it even appear when it isn't 2:30 yet? What? Why? Gah!
563) So I'm using Outlook ("Well, that's your problem!" a la Click & Clack) and I've got a meeting in the calendar. I open it up to check out who the attendees are. It lists a bunch of folks, then it has groups which are just names and don't show who is in the group. You can open the group up, but when you do you get one of the most pathetic dialog boxes ever. The kicker is that if you don't dismiss that dialog you can switch to other Outlook windows, like a letter you are composing, yet none of the controls work. So it looks like everything is all frozen waiting on the server or something. So it is a half-modal dialog box. This is completely insane!
562) More impressiveness! I'm looking at a Word document in IE (which always sucks a lot of ass just to begin with, but whatever) and I'm scrolling down through it with my wheel mouse. The document has images in it. If I scroll onto a page with a graphic, I only end up seeing a bunch of white space and then the lower few lines of the image. If I then scroll back up, whatever part of the image was off the top of the window will now appear as the graphic, rather than white space.
561) Riddle me why this happens: I'm in Outlook. I wanna attach some files in the mail I'm writing. I'm looking for Foo.bar and Foo.baz to include. So in the dialog box for finding the files to attach, I enter Foo.*. Now, there are Foos.dat and Foos.txt files, which I don't want to see. I just want to see everything that has 'Foo' in front of the period, or dot, and anything after it. What I end up seeing is everything which starts with Foo. So I guess the dot is acting like other regexp systems. That would be fine if it weren't for the fact that DOS shells etc. consider the period to be just a period and not a regexp pattern. So how the heck to I escape things, anyway, since the backslash is a directory path separator in bloody Windows? Argh! Hate.
560) MS Publisher does the completely stupid thing where I can open a document, do nothing but print it, close it... and have the program ask me if I want to save my 'changes'. I. Hate. Everyone.
559) Wait. I can't tell the Search in the File Explorer to just search for folders? Oh, wait, it is buried in the rather scary Search Options / Type pop-up list. Well, okay.
558) Things have gotten a little out of hand when it comes to copy and paste. Like, if I just want to copy some text from a web page in IE and paste it into Word, I end up with all the formatting, and pictures, etc. It is actually kind of hard to just copy out the stupid text alone! Then, there's the whole thing where you can select HTML objects, as it were, in IE. I mean, I never want that. What is it even for? Why would a regular everyday grandma type user ever care to select that crap? It all just ends up making it ever more difficult to do the simple things I wanted to do.
557) When I order something via the web, I tend to want to keep a copy of the final confirmation page in my records. I'd like to just keep a copy of it in email so I email myself the page rather than printing it out and killing trees. Of course, when I email the page it doesn't actually email a copy of the page as it was then. It sends me something more active. So when I go look at that email in the future it actually like tries to connect to the original store's web server, which then just gives me an error message, since I wasn't actually making an order right then. Okay, that pretty much sucks ass.
556) MS products aren't just bad, they are freaking out. I do an Advanced Find in Outlook and get the results. They are presented in a list with columns (Flags, From, Subject, Received, etc.) which you can resize and sort by etc. Well, first off, the little graphic arrow which tells you which column is the index, and which way it is sorted isn't always drawn. You might have to resize the columns to be wider to give it enough room to appear. Okay, whatever, that seems lame to begin with. But then while I was resizing things to find out which column was the index, I noticed that the redraw and resize behaviour of the list was non-deterministic. Like, I would resize the dialog to be wider and the individual columns would get wider, and then I would make the dialog smaller and things would shrink, but then when I made it wider again it wouldn't enlarge the columns the same way it did the first time. Really friggin' weird, man!
555) If you have more than one monitor hooked up to Windows 2000 and then try to take a snapshot of the desktop, it won't work. You will get a corrupted image in the clipboard. If you turn off one of the monitors as desktop in the Display Properties control panel, it will work. (Of course, if you do that, then you will be screwed in plenty of other ways.
554) Okay, I'm sure of it: Visio is a festering piece of crap. In particular, when you resize something, it doesn't resize the lines or the text. So as you try to squeeze something down, everything just starts to overlap and become a blobby mess. Right. That's exactly the behaviour I wanted and was expecting and will need to use all the time. Sure. Uh huh.
553) In Outlook, you can group your messages based on a header. Like, you can group them all by the "From:" header. What sucks ass is that it then doesn't update other columns of the list of messages like the size. The reason I want to glom stuff together in the first place is I want to see what is the largest set of email so I can delete it and free up some space. So near, and yet so far away...
552) Riddle me this. I've got '"Blastwind" saturn review' in the text field on www.google.com and I double-click in Blastwind and end up with the word and the first double quote mark selected. What in the hell is IE thinking? Gah! ... Oh. My. God! Wanna know what the kicker is? Wanna? So I try to just click-and-drag to select the stuff in the double quotes, and as I reach the end the selection suddenly jerks automatically to the end, including the double quote again. Could. I. Hate. This. More? Oh, wait, note that it only happens when you are dragging from right-to-left. If you go the other way, it works fine. Gabba gabba gabba. (Of course, the other side of the coin is that when I go to select and copy something I find that when I paste it into the quotes it comes with spaces at the end... I literally cannot win.)
551) I'm trying to look through a folder/shortcut I've set up in MS Outlook. I click on the folder. It always wants to show me the first message in that folder. Okay, that's fine. What totally sucks, however, is that it has to fetch that message from the server, and if that message is at all long then the app locks up with a wait cursor while it is fetching that message. I don't even care about the first message, I'm looking for a completely different message. So every time I go to that folder I'm penalized by a crappy system. Why doesn't it let me interrupt it? Or why doesn't it cache the first message? Or why doesn't it remember the selection from the last time I was in that folder? Or any number of way-less-suckful possibilities?
550) I don't know how they do it. I mean, it seems like they would really have to exert a lot of effort to screw things up this badly. I swear, every bloody app from MS uses a different dialog box just for finding a file (to Open or to Insert or whatever). And each and every one seems to completely suck in some really fundamental manner. I just don't get it. I mean, isn't there just supposed to be some generic call to the OS to get an Open dialog? Gah! Hate!
549) I know Microsoft is a bunch of weasel money grubbing lame butt scum sucking yellow bellied monopolist jerks, but I'm still surprised that neither MS Publisher nor MS PhotoDraw support reading Photoshop files. What complete butt munchers.
548) In IE you can hold down the Ctrl key and use the mouse wheel to zoom the page in and out. That it nice and all, but I think the implementation leaves a little to be desired. The problem is that it zooms the document inside the view and doesn't try to keep the view centered around the same text. So when you change the zoom, you end up seeing a different part of the document. It is pretty confusing. I think if they had made sure to center around the middle of the viewable area of the document things would be much less confusing. But, hey, that's just me.
547) Modal dialogs suck a lot. When I'm signing up for a new bill paying service, I want to add the domain to my list of Trusted Sites. But when I bring up the dialog to add it, everything sucks because a) the dialog tends to show up over the address field in the main window, b) the dialog where I enter the url is actually a secondary dialog, so by the time I'm in that one I can't move it's parent dialog because the new one is also modal, so I can't just move the dialogs out of the way to see what the address is and finally c) if the url is long then sometimes (i.e.: at least just now) the address field shows the end of it which is patently not what I need to know about for updating the sites list.
546) I'm trying to use MS Visio and MS Publisher. Why did people do away with the hand tool? Why isn't the magnifying glass a tool any more, but instead just a button? Blah.
545) I'm trying to install MS Publish, and the install dialog comes up. Since I'm trying to get something done at the same time, I move the install dialog over to the second display. When the dialog is done, another dialog comes up... on the primary display. So I move that one over as well. Of course, there's yet another dialog box, and it doesn't show up on the main display either. Ok, whatever, I should just give all my time and energy to the stupid installer. I mean, it isn't like I have a really expensive computer with multiple processors, an OS with multi-threading, and more than one display. Noooooo.
544) I don't understand how people can possibly use NT or any variant thereof for a server cluster. I mean, if you have to go through the manual GUI process of downloading and applying critical updates, you'd presumably have to use Terminal Services Client on one machine after the other, and that would really suck. (Seems like with unix type OSs, you can use ssh/rsh to script it across all the machines.)

543) Win2K completely screws up my desktop when I en/disable the secondary monitor. It moves all my desktop icons around. And it even moves the relative location of the secondary monitor around. Like, when I disabled it, it was suddenly moved. When I went back late to enable it, it was in a completely different place yet again. You'd figure someone would almost have to work really hard to screw things up so badly.
542) I want to be able to list email in Outlook based on the domain. So if I have some spammer sending stuff with different userID, but the same domain, I can get all their stuff together to easily delete it all. Doesn't look immediately obviously to be something it supports.
541) MS Photo Editor is killing me. In pretty much every other Windows application on Earth, the mouse scroll wheel us used to scroll a document up and down. Some applications support holding down the Ctrl key as a modifier to make the mouse wheel perform a zooming function (so you can make the document larger or smaller). Well, Photo Editor just gets rid of the document scrolling and the Ctrl key modifier, so when you use the mouse wheel the only thing that can happen is the document zooms in or out. Uh, yeah. Great. Bloody brilliant. Can I just start the eternal punishments here and now?
540) It pisses me off that MS products really try to help you out by doing stuff based on the file name extension. Like, if I have a fragment of an html file that I want to view in IE, it cannot have .txt as the ending - in that case, IE will just shunt it off to Notepad. Yay. I guess they need to have Open As... in all their applications.
539) In IE, you can add a page to your Favorites in one of several different ways. What sucks about them is that they have different characteristics. If I have the panel of Favorites showing and I drag the URL from the Address into the folder I want, it doesn't give me the chance to re-title it. The only way to get that ability is to use the Favorites menu (which sucks when you are adding things to a folder that is buried deep w/in the Favorites) etc.
538) I have stuff in Excel. I want to sort it based on an index column. I select that column, in this case column D, and then select Data/Sort. It asks me if I want to expand to use all the data, and I say yes. It then brings up the sort dialog with column A as the sort column. Okay, that's completely brilliant.
537) It pisses me off that I can't have both the Favorites and the History showing as panels in IE. Like, I want to be able to find stuff in the History and easily move it into folders in my Favorites. Whatever.
536) MS Office apparently uses its own Open File dialog. On the left it has some shortcuts to folders like Favorites. Okay, so let's say I'm moving around in the file system hierarchy using this dialog box. In fact, I have to do that quite often, because it doesn't remember where I was or what I was doing after I quit an app. When I restart the app (in this case Excel) and bring up the Open File dialog, it shows me My Documents or something like that. Whatever. So, anyway, I click around to get where I want to be, and then I want to save that by adding it to the Favorites, right? But, of course, I cannot drag-and-drop the target folder into the Favorites. Dogged!
535) There's a file that has the same name, but different incarnations, located in a directory tree. I want to copy all those different versions over to another machine. What a remarkable pain in the ass.
534) Sure, you can put CygWin on your Windows PC, but then you are still in for the nightmare of carriage-return vs. line-feeds. Not to mention forward vs. back slashes. Not to mention 8.3 file names. Yadda yadda yadda. I'm using the CygWin stuff and it just doesn't really fit in the Windows world; it wants to change the end-of-line character everywhere. So I have some file that I ran through sed or uniq or something, and then I import that into Excel. Well, now everything shows up as having an extra glyph at the end that is a square. Excel's way of saying "it is some evil control character" I guess. So I select a cell with that square glyph, I select the square glyph, I copy it, and then I bring up the Find/Replace dialog and attempt to paste the glyph in so I can go about getting rid of it from my spreadsheet. The funny thing is, when I paste, nothing happens. It doesn't want to let me paste in that weird glyph, so I can't go about replacing it. So unless I decide to manually fix all the cells with said glyph, I'm screwed. Nice. I can see the glyph. I can apparently copy the glyph; nothing beeps and no error dialogs appear. Yet I cannot paste it. Yay.
533) Why haven't they given us a "Paste As..." command yet? Like, how bloody backward are these people? I know, let's make the buttons all shiny, and forget about actually making the system do anything useful.
532) I'm not entirely sure who to blame here. I'd guess that it is something which could be hacked somehow by the OS, at any rate, to magically work. But Acrobat Reader 5.0, when I try to open a file, it brings up the OS's File Open dialog. If I type in an URL like http://www.foo.com/bp6e.pdf and hit Open, it tells me "The above file name is invalid." Looserz. Lamerz. Neo-Luddites.
531) So I'm running XP Pro on a machine at home. When I bring up the File Explorer, it starts out with My Documents selected in the left pane. And thus its children are shown in the left pane. Uh, I pretty much haven't ever switched over to this thing that MS decided was good for me, so I've never used the My Documents folders, really. So I'd appreciate a way to tell this File Explorer thing to go to hell and stop having My Documents selected. I'd much prefer it have My Computer selected so I could get to the stuff on my machine's hard drives. Whatever. Hate.
530) In the File Explorer, when you have the left-hand Folders pane, it shows you which folder you are looking in by showing an icon that is an open folder, rather than a closed one. However, when you look at folders that are on the network, it seems to use the same 'networked folder' icon no matter what. Nice.
529) Oh. My. God. So I'm trying to look at a folder on another machine on the network. I type the path to the machine into the Address field and that works fine. However, now the Folders pane is being updated to show - get this - all machines that are on the "Microsoft Windows Network". Given the company I'm at, that is a complete and utter assload of machines. So now I'm getting dialog boxes coming up every few minutes saying "Unknown is not accessible. The list of servers for this workgroup is not currently available." Uh, you know, I really don't care about anything other than the one folder on the one machine I wanna use. And now I have to suffer through this crap! And, the whole thing is ignoring me while it tries to ping all those machines. So I end up using the Task Manager to kill that process, which actually ends up killing every explorer process, which means even the root desktop taskbar explorer process goes away. This. Is. INSANE!
528) As if the whole volume control thing wasn't already a sufficiently huge steaming pile of feces, we now all have to suffer when playing WMA/MP3/etc. files. That's because the Windows Media Player now has its own bloody volume control as well. Can. I. Please. Slap. Them?
527) Okay, the folks who wrote Outlook need spanked. The dialog which comes up for "Insert File" is a lot like a regular Open File dialog. However, if you enter "*.txt" in the "File name" field, unlike the Open File dialog, you will not see all those files ending in .txt, even if the "File of type" field is set to "All Files". What a piece of complete crap!
526) When you hit the Alt key, you get the menus for the current applications. At first, you get the menu title itself (e.g.: 'File'). If you hit an up or down arrow key at that point, you get the first item in the first menu (e.g.: 'New'). Now you cannot ever get back to having 'File' selected; moving up and down in the menu with the arrow keys will just loop the selection and keep it always in the menu items. What sucks about all this is when you want to move to another menu. If the item you've got selected is a hierarchical submenu, then instead of going from 'File' to 'Edit', you instead go from 'New' to (in the case of Outlook) 'New Mail Message'. You are still stuck in the 'File' menu, drilling down. If you hit the right arrow again, you might finally get into the 'Edit' menu. It all just seems lame. Also, as Drew noted, the title of the menu no longer inverts, instead it just does the bas-relief thing. That is such a subtle change that quite often you don't even know if you hit the Alt key or not.
525) Have I mentioned this before? I hold down the shift key too long and up comes a dialog box telling me something about how by holding it down too long I'm asking the system to go into some user assistance mode. The dialog box is from hell. It has a checkbox saying, in effect, "never do this again" yet I keep seeing this dialog box. So, somehow either the checkbox isn't working, or the setting is getting reset elsewhere, elsewhen. All I know is, it sucks.
524) I have some shortcuts in IE that are in their own Links toolbar. Most of the time they are fine. But, on occasion, they randomly rearrange themselves without my behest... Cool! Yeah! That's what I wanted, I just didn't know it!
523) Could it be possible for the Windows Media Player to be more of a piece of excrement? I've already talked some about how it kinda sucks just for listening to CDs. Now, I'm trying to copy some CDs to the hard drive. I think these are mostly about v7...
1. This one is about v8: It doesn't have a left-hand tab that says "CD Music" or whatever. Instead, it has a tab that says "Copy from CD". But I don't want to copy anything, I just want to play the CD, so I wouldn't think to click on that tab, except as a last, desperate attempt to find a way to play the stupid CD. And it defaults to recording everything. I mean, sure, maybe that is the way of the future but it just seems wrong to me right now.
2. Ha ha ha ha ha ha! I put a CD in and I get the most excellent dialog box. (And! Witness the fact that MS Paint completely screws the pooch when it comes to GIF color palettes!) All this just from inserting a CD. Yes!
3. The UI for "CD Audio" isn't clear enough about what track is playing. The problem is there are two kinds of selections: one where the background of the row is hilighted, the other where a dotted border surrounds the row. It really isn't obvious what those mean. When both are in the same place, fine, but when they aren't it is very confusing. At the bottom of the player, right by the play/pause etc. buttons, it rotates text through the album and artist name, and then says "Playing". So why the hell doesn't it say what it is playing? Oh, wait, apparently in the Media Library mode it does show the Song title in addition to the artist and album. But not in the CD mode?
4. It can't figure out what album I have in. I guess it isn't in CDDB. I've got it all recorded and in the WMP Library. I want to rename the artist and album... but I don't see a way to do that. Nice. As if just because CDDB didn't know what it was, I don't either? So now I have to just use the regular File Explorer and edit the stupid folder structure and naming myself. Can. I. Please. Slap. Everyone. Silly? Oh, and the real kicker is that I have to quit and restart WMP before it will get the new names of the folders; there isn't any refresh command that I can find. Yay. Oh, wait, quitting and restarting it didn't help... Oh boy. I can see this is going to be a world of fun. Oh... I think I get it: it doesn't matter what I call the folders because the information is inside the .wma files themselves. And, so far, I have found no way of editing those values. So I'm doomed to have "Unnamed" things for ever?! Augh!
5. So, because of the issues described immediately above, I start a new play list. Then, I drag-and-drop "Track 1" through "Track 9" into that play list. WMP shows all of the tracks, but it has sorted them in some screwy way; it shows tracks 5, 2, 3, 4, 1, 6, 7, 8, and 9 in that order. I click on the Name column to sort by the name and... no change. Oookaaayyy... I'm really not sure on which planet 5 comes before 2 and 1 after 4, but it sure isn't mine.
6. I think it relies on settings from IE for how it renders its UI; if I change the IE/Internet Options/Accessibility... stuff then the UI in WMP gets whacked (just like the Add/Remove Programs control panel). Genius!
7. The UI sucks so much ass in so many ways. Like, how the check boxes next to tracks in the CD view are for recording, yet it doesn't actually say anything in the column header about it being for recording. Like how there are basically two different controls for starting and stopping; one for playing the CD and one for recording, so it gets very confusing very quickly. Like how when you are in the Library, you can right-click on something and choose Info, which shows you another UI, but then if you click on "Media Library" from the right (main) menu, then nothing happens... you have to press the teeny little back button to get what you want. Etc. Ad nauseum. Blah blah blah.
8. It bugs me that I can't set a selection within a song to repeat. Or, heck, to always skip. I always want that and no player ever has it. Whatever.
9. So I'm trying to get the stupid thing to know that it is a Stereolab CD. I can find the information on CDDB. But is there a way to download that from their page? Like as some XML thing that works with everybody's player? No. So then I'm trying to drive it from the WMP end. First off, can you easily tell what in the holy Hannah the difference between "Get Names" and "Update Names" is? I mean, could we have more useless naming? Anyway, "Get Names" will apparently bring up some kind of CDDB search. So I type in "Stereolab" as the artist name, and the thing apparently goes off to try and find the data... and never comes back. It is still searching. I've got the results in another window on my desktop, in my web browser, and I can't get it into WMP, and it can't even do the same search successfully. It is still just saying "Please wait..." Augh! And you think your Grandmother is going to be able to use Linux?
10. I want it to just stop after playing the one song. I don't want it to go on to the next song. I don't see a way of making this the behaviour. Suck!
522) It pisses me off no end that Win2K can't show folder sizes in the File Explorer.
521) It sucks that every time I use the Advanced Search in Outlook, I have to set it to look in both the subject field and message body.
520) Riddle me this: I can copy some text from an app, but then when I try to paste it into the Command Prompt shell the Paste menu item is deactivated. I can paste the text into other apps just fine, only not into the shell. I can even right-click and have the text pasted in the shell! It is only the menu item which is disabled! Insanity!
519) Another hysterical thing about multiple monitors under Win2K (and maybe XP, who knows) is that if you change the relative positioning of the displays, then program windows can appear off the edge of the display. Like, I have a child window of Visual Studio (it is the Definitions and References window) that is on my secondary display, the title bar of which is off the top of the screen. Since the window is a child of VS, I can't even use Alt-Space to get to the move command for it; instead, it gives me control over the main VS window. So, pretty much, I'm screwed. Genius! Now, I could go back into the Display Properties and move the secondary display around and get the window title bar and move it down and then move my secondary display back to where it was, but that is going to suck lots of eggs. Especially because it took a while to get the two displays lined up just right (or as close to just right as the control panel would let me), and there is no way to save the setting, and I don't want to have to go back through all that again.
518) While I'm on the topic, if you are adjusting the relative positioning of your multiple displays by moving them vertically, then as their icons move in the Display Properties the icons also resize themselves to try and say within their parent area. It is really quite disconcerting because the icon size also changes when you change the resolution of a given display. Sure, the control panel is still trying to show you both the displays at a correct size relative to one another, but it still is annoying confusing distressing and bad. Sure, there is a tooltip that shows you some numbers as you are moving the displays around but the numbers are never explained. They look scary and impressive, and they might actually mean something, but nothing in the system attempts to tell me what exactly the hell they do mean and what good they would ever do me. (Yeah, actually I can figure all this out, but think about the average home user having to deal with this arcane crap.)
517) In IE, if you have the Favorites up as its own panel in the browser, you are screwed if the titles for the favorites go past the right edge of the panel because there is no horizontal scrollbar. You might think that the tool-tip would tell you the full name, like it does for a clipped filename in the File Explorer, but actually what you get in the tool-tip is the URL. Dogged!
516) If you hilight a ton of files to delete in the File Explorer and then one of them can't be deleted because of a Sharing Violation (!) then the delete just stops there, and none of the subsequent files get deleted. What the hell?
515) So I want to find a Favorite URL by doing a search to match part of the URL. I cannot apparently do that in IE itself. So I get to my Favorites folder in the File Explorer, and right-click on that folder... and there is no Search entry. Folders above and below it in the hierarchy have the entry, it is only the Favorites one that doesn't. Hello? The work-around is to just search from the parent folder and then edit the path to be Favorites, which means there is no good reason to go to the trouble they had to go to to remove the command in the first place, as far as I can tell! Can the offending people please be slapped silly?
514) If you are searching through files using the Search in the File Explorer, while results are coming in you can scroll down through them. However, when the search completes, the view will suddenly jump back to the very start, losing your scroll position. Really. Bloody. Annoying.
513) IE doesn't show me how many bits or kbits or kbytes or anything per second I'm getting on an FTP download. Kinda sucks, because I'd like to compare two mirror sites. In fact, it doesn't even tell me how much data has been received. I just have the cheesy animation and a progress bar that isn't budging. Oh, and a "3 hours and 7 minutes remaining" that isn't changing, either.
512) Tasty. I have an Iomega Zip 100 internal IDE drive in my PC running WinXP Pro. I put in a Zip disk. The File Explorer won't show me what's on it. In fact, it just keeps telling me to insert a disk; it doesn't even realize there is anything in there. Nice. So I try a different disk. It works. Okay, it would be nice if the OS could figure out the difference between a corrupt disk and no disk, but whatever. So then I'm doing stuff and I then Eject the disk using the File Explorer (not just the button on the drive itself) and then a second or two later after I've pulled the disk out I get a dialog box telling me that a Delayed Write failed and that the data is lost for ever. Okay, that's completely brilliant. So then I go to the Properties for the Zip drive and I find that I'm not allowed to disable the delayed writes.
511) I open a file in VS. I do some stuff. I close the file. I then try to delete the folder containing the file via the Windows File Explorer. It tells me there's a sharing violation (couldn't they have come up with a term that sounds less like some disturbing sexual problem?) and won't let me delete it. I go and quit VS. You know, the VS where I'd already closed the bloody file. The sharing violation problem goes away. I. Hate. Everything. Especially Windows.
510) This takes the biscuit. Someone else received a message with some folks CC:'d in it, and I want to get those email addresses. So, the other person forwards the email to me. However, Outlook changes the only email address that is kept in the forwarded message is that of the original sender. All the others appear only as names. So that is completely useless. So we try to maybe resend the message, but that wouldn't be good because I don't really want to do that, I just want the email addresses. So then I just bring up the mail message, select everything in the CC: field, copy it, and then try to paste it into something else... and all I get are the names. No email addresses. Finally, someone figures out that if you go into View/Options... then all of the raw headers of the message are displayed, and you can copy them out. So I finally get my email addresses. You'd think Outlook would be done completely screwing me silly with its completely stupid and hateful interface. But, noooo, it isn't enough! Because I then go to copy and paste the data into a message I'm composing but that gets all screwed up because Outlook doesn't like commas for separating email addresses, it only handles semicolons. So it pretty much tries to turn everything into one single address. Yes, it is this kind of thing that leads to global thermonuclear war.
509) So I'm reading email in Outlook and in the message there's a mailto: url. I can click on it to bring up a new message with that email address in the To: field. So that's fine. But, like, say I just want to copy the address. There isn't anything in the right-click menu for that. Oh well.
508) The mouse wheel is a nice invention and all, but sometimes the implementation is kinda silly. If I'm looking at a web page in IE and there's an area in the page that is scrollable then I can scroll it fine with the mouse wheel... until I get to the end of that sub area. Then, the wheel tells the enclosing page to scroll. Very disconcerting.
507) I'm using Windows Messenger. Kill me. I'm trying to type a message in and so the mouse cursor is there. So the balloon help comes up telling me, gee, that is the place I'm supposed to type messages. And, of course, the balloon help appears over that area, obscuring my efforts to type. Genius!
506) Oh my gawd. Okay, so they tried to make the XP Alt-Tab application switching fancier, but it is so slow! It is killing me! I hate it!
505) What is one of the major reasons someone might be going into the Add Remove Programs control panel? Maybe, like, to free up space on their hard drives? So maybe it could show you how much space a program is taking up on various partitions? So you'd know which ones to kill off first? Whatever.
504) So I'm upgrading to WinXP Pro. It copies some files over from the CD and then puts up a progress bar saying it will restart the computer (when the progress bar gets to the end). It says that you can manually restart the machine by hitting the Esc key. I figured that meant I could hit the Esc key and not have to wait for the progress bar timer to complete, which I think is how previous versions of Windows Installers worked. Anyway, of course it has to be different and stupid now so instead of just restarting the machine it takes me out to the desktop and I have to restart the machine myself. I guess that is what manually means, after all. I'm annoyed that they didn't apparently have an option for just immediately restarting?
503) I'm so glad Excel can repaint itself properly. Oh, wait, it can't... see the text in the edit field; see how it no longer has the base of the text aligned after a window that was partially obscuring it was moved away. (I'm also really impressed with how the MS Accessory Paint changes white to green when it is saving an image as GIF!)
502) The WinNT/2K/XP shell is the biggest turd I've ever experienced. Along with Excel, the fun is just too much for my delicate constitution. Like, I'm trying to copy a string from a field in an Excel sheet and paste it into the Shell. If I copy the text from the editing field at the top of the sheet, the Paste command is grayed out in the Shell. If I right-click on the cell itself, then the Paste command is available but when I paste, there is a carriage return (or is it linefeed, whatever) in the text so the thing I paste suddenly is interpreted as an immediate command! What the hell? Argh! Hate! Also, apparently, no matter how wide the window is the visible portion of the current command line is limited to some fixed number of characters (or maybe it is the bash I'm running). All software, everywhere, sucks ass.
501) Why isn't the "Open With..." item just always there?
500) The MS Trackball Explorer is great and all, but I wish the Intellipoint software would let me make it so that Ctrl+Wheel meant scrolling more than just using the wheel alone.
499) With WinXP, if you install some new program then when you click to bring up the start menu there can be a little balloon help thing pointing at the "All Programs" menu item that says "New programs installed." The unmitigated genius of the implementation of this is that the balloon text covers up another entry in the start menu, namely the "Log Off" one, and partly obscures the "Turn Off Computer" one. I'm crying.
498) I don't know if it is IE6 or WinXP or both working together to make life suck, but now when I am downloading a game demo and I minimize the download window, rather than minimizing to the taskbar it just becomes a small window (really just a small titlebar) sitting just above the taskbar. Whatever!
497) WinXP is killing me. If I put in a Zip disk it creates a new window for it. I don't recall this happening in WinNT or Win2K. And where am I going to find the expletive option to turn this "feature" off? I tried searching in help for things like "zip", "iomega" and "removable" and didn't really find anything actually helpful. Hell.
496) Argh! You can turn off the grid lines in Excel, but you can't just turn off the horizontal ones and keep the vertical ones (or the other way around, of course).
495) Once Outlook has turned text into an email address, you apparently can't go back and edit the individual letters of the address. It treats them as a single unit, so if you move the cursor with the arrow keys it just jumps right over the whole address. Very disconcerting, I feel.
494) MS PhotoDraw is such a flying piece of crap. Like, you look under the View menu to try and get the image to be showing at 100% (since there doesn't appear to be anything normally on-screen telling you what the zoom is) and there isn't anything regular like you might expect - there is nothing about what zoom level you are currently at. Eventually you might figure out you have to choose the Pan and Zoom menu entry which brings up a little window to help you pan and zoom. It tells you the zoom level. And then it goes and apparently limits how much you can zoom in. Why can't I zoom in to an individual pixel if I want to? Like, currently, I want to zoom way in to see like ten pixels, but apparently it won't let me. The upper bound is 600% zoom, which really isn't enough. Oh, and then the brush size is in points, rather than pixels. Whatever.
493) Okay, MS Photo Paint is apparently attempting to take new approaches to the whole photo editing thing, because it is completely not doing anything remotely like what I would expect. I zoom in and paint some stuff in a particular color, then I zoom out and suddenly my marks are now huge blue things rather than the tiny dark gray ones I was applying. They are in the same place, but the size and color has mysteriously completely altered. Nice! Yeah!
492) I love how WinXP doesn't tell you what key to press to get into Safe Mode. Like, my machine's clock got screwy and so WinXP tells me it won't let me in 'cause of activation stuff, and tells me to boot into Safe Mode and fiddle with the time control panel... but the dialog doesn't tell me how to get into Safe Mode, and the start-up screens don't say how to get into Safe Mode, either. Win2K used to tell you. Whatever. Jerks. I tried hitting F8 like over and over while the thing was booting and it didn't work. I tried hitting F2, I tried Ctrl... no luck.
491) In WinXP you can tell the screen saver to go back to the intro Welcome screen where the user has to enter their password, for safety. What is kinda lame about it is: you go away, the screen saver starts, you come back and move the mouse and the screen saver goes away, showing you your regular desktop... for a second, then suddenly replacing it with the Welcome screen. Just looks really cheesy and doesn't give an impression of security. As if the machine was like, "Oh, wait a second, I was going to let you go right ahead and have the desktop back, but now I remember that I'm not supposed to let you back in without a password, so hold on and I'll bring up the Welcome screen."
490) Could we maybe make the spelling dialog in Outlook a little more scary? Too many freakin' buttons, man! Sheesh. Just an onslaught of UI widgets! Damn.
489) WinXP wants me to activate it. But it won't let me get to the networking control panel to set up my network settings so it can't actually talk to the MS servers, so I can't activate it (other than by phone which I bet is a huge pain in the ass). Sheer genius. Idiots.
488) I have a picture in IE. I right-click and choose to open it in MS PhotoDraw. So that application comes up with some scary dialog that is asking me (apparently) to choose which picture from the web page to import. Well, there was only one picture on the page to begin with, so why the hell is it asking me that? And no matter what I do, the OK button is always grayed out, so I can't import the image. There is no explanation of why I can't do it, it just adamantly refuses to let me. So I just figure I can use copy-and-paste, so I copy it out of IE and then discover that the paste command is not active in PhotoDraw. Again, no explanation for why. So then I save the stupid thing from IE and try to open it in PhotoDraw and discover that it just can't handle that image type. Get this, IE can handle the file type, but PhotoDraw cannot. And the thing is an image, after all. Hello?
487) Outlook is, as usual, killing me. I get a message that has some HTML formatting in it. I reply to the sender, which excerpts the original message in my reply. I try to edit the excerpt to pear it down to the part my reply concerns. Turns out there are parts of the excerpted text that Outlook will not let me delete. I can select it, but if I hit the backspace key the text stays there (the selection goes away and the cursor is set to the start of the block). If I select it and right-click, the cut command is unavailable. Other parts of the reply are deletable, though. It is just so wonderful that there is no clear actual reason for not being able to delete text. What complete and utter insanity.
486) Sure, you can play around with the Appearance of Windows in the Display control panel, but then you find out that things like Outlook can end up using the same color for folder shortcut text fg and bg. Nice. Just seems like the whole thing is a big crock.
485) It still kills me how much of a pain in the ass it is to just copy text. Like, I just want to copy text without any embedded formatting from IE and paste it into a message I'm composing in Outlook, and I want the text to be in the same font style as what I've already written... but nooo.
484) If I select a set of files in the File Explorer, and then right-click and choose Properties, it shows me the sum total properties. That is actually pretty nice - the Mac would put up as many properties dialogs as files. Of course, it kind of annoyed me the first time it happened in Windows because I actually wanted all the individual properties so I could compare them... ha ha.
483) I get a message in Outlook. It has a ton of files attached. They are visible in the message as file indicators. I can select one. I can right-click and Save As... but if I try to select more than one, Outlook decides I'm selecting text, and not a set of files, and the right-click menu is different. Uh, yeah, brilliant.
482) I love how some pop-up menu/list things in Windows let you type a word and the selection converges on the closest entry, but then other ones take each keystroke as the first letter and so as you are typing the selection is flying around and not converging. And there aren't any visual clues to tell you which mode the thing you are looking at uses.
481) Help in Outlook forces what you type in, as you are typing it, to only be words in it's index. While that is sort of sensible, it ends up being just plain stupid and annoying in practice because you are trying to type something in and it just won't let you. Very bad interaction; much better to let the user enter things and then tell them there weren't matches, or interactively show that there aren't any matches but in another area. The only thing the way it works now does is shove people's blood pressure through the roof!
480) I'm trying to move some files from one directory to another, using the File Explorer ("Well, there's your problem!" - Click & Clack). I drag the files I want over the folder I want to drop them in, which is in the left hand tree pane, and is like three folders away from the bottom of the pane, and suddenly (just as I'm letting go of the button!) the whole tree starts to scroll up! My files disappear, and I don't really know where they have gone!
479) Oh, this is rich! If you turn off colors of documents in IE, then in Outlook you don't see any colors in your messages, either. Please can we start the beatings?
478) I'm checking out Windows XP RC1. It is, of course, a flying piece of dung in many respects when it comes to the UI.
1. At the login screen, when you hit tab, nothing very clear happens. I really cannot tell what has focus. Sometimes, some text will get underlined. But pretty much nothing else has any obvious visual feedback. If your mouse is kaput and all you have is the keyboard, there is nothing helping you out. (Turns out if you hit Ctrl-Alt-Del you get the WinNT/2K style login dialog box which is a lot better about keyboard focus control.)
2. I upgraded from an install of Win2K that already had an Administrator account. When I went to add another user under XP, it refused to let me make a non-administrative account. Apparently, it thought I didn't have any administrative accounts? Nor did it ever explain why it was forcing me to make an administrative account before I could make regular accounts. All in all, a hugely stupid piece of crap sequence of interactions.
3. Holy crap!The account which took over the Administrator role had no password! None! It was completely open to anybody who clicked on it to log in! What in the holy hell are these people thinking? I mean, the original Administrator account had a password, so what the hell happened to that?
4. When I was activating the installation, it put up a big dialog box. There was a large headline of text. The bottom of the text, like the last 3 pixels or something, was chopped off. Yeah! Nice work, kids!
5. As it is booting, it fades the splash/loading screen in. That is so mind-bogglingly stupid I cannot fathom it. I mean, here you are, just having installed this presumably still buggy thing, and you are faced with a black screen which is prolonged by slowly fading in something which would let you know the machine hasn't just completely locked up or lost its mind. Hello? We want feedback sooner rather than later you poop heads!
6. The splash/loading screen has a thing which is not a progress bar. It is a set of dots that scrolls across and then starts over. In some vague fashion, it is a heart-beat - I guess you are supposed to be reassured that as long as the dots are moving your machine is alive. The kicker is that there are times during the start-up that the dots actually do stop moving!
7. I think you still have to right-click to bring up the File Explorer. Double-clicking cannot be set to bring it up, as far as I can tell, just like all equally stupid previous versions of Windows.
8. The UI is attempting to be more happy friendly and stuff, and seems to hide things further down through mazes of hierarchical menus and folders and things. Here's a clue for the Windows folks: It turns out the flatter your UI the better. The more hierarchical, the more likely it is that users will get lost. A flat UI means I can see all my options and get to them easily, rather than having to find some secret path to get to the controls I want. XP continues the path into the land of suck blazed by its ancestors.
9. The password field on the login screen shows your keystrokes as fat dots. If your password is longer than the room allocated for the dots, it basically looks like the field is full and the rest of your password is either wrong or ignored or something. Sure, maybe all the dots are scrolling one character to the left with each extra key stroke, but you couldn't see them scroll because the dots all look the same and are the same width and everything and exactly fit in the space, so nothing appears to be moving. Pretty bloody stupid - I mean, if I can't see the keystrokes having any effect after some point, then (reductio ad absurdum) why even bother having the stupid entry field in the first place?
477) I'm trying to compose a letter in MS Word. Parts of the letter are coming from email I've received, parts are coming from web pages I've gotten to, parts are just typed in from scratch. Every time I try to copy something from another app and paste it in, it shows up as "HTML Preformattext" and it is absolutely killing me. I want it to just show up as plain text would in Word, as if I'd just typed it in. All this interoperability is crap! Complete and utter crap, I say! Bah!
476) Maybe I'm just old school, but I really dislike the fact that when I right-click on a link in IE and "Copy Shortcut" and then paste it into Outlook, I don't get the actual text of the URL. I get some embedded obnoxious stupid object. Also, if you drag-and-drop a link from IE into an Outlook message, things are added as attachments. That royally sucks when someone has Outlook set to filter out attachments (especially because it is so hard to figure out how to change that bloody setting) because the thing I wanted to send them, a simple piece of bloody text, is now impossible for them to see.
475) So my mouse wasn't working. So I try to get help on it; I am looking through the device drivers and see the Troubleshooting button. So I do that. It brings up a help window. I try using the Tab key to move to other panels, but I can't seem to get there. Then, I see the text that says I need to use F6. What? Okay, so I'm trying to get help because my machine is broken and I'm presented with some means of navigation I've never seen anywhere else when using Windows. Great. Intuitive. Easy. Helpful. I mean, shouldn't that be the kind of situation where you try really hard to make sure the navigation and control is as completely straight-forward and stupid simple as humanly possible?
474) It is hard to copy text in IE that is a link, without having the link activated. So why isn't there a right-click menu option to just copy the text instead of the shortcut? Geeze Louise!
473) The whole app-inside-another-app OLE thing is such intensive crap. I have an Acrobat file inside IE and I can't even search text; I hit Ctrl-F and type in text that is staring me right in the face and it doesn't find it. Also, where are all the damned menus? Apparently you have to right-click inside the document and there's "Find..." there. Everybody must go read Jef Raskin or something and then just start the shooting.
472) Did I already mention that you apparently can't restrict a text search to just those files that are in the project? So if you remove a file from the project, but don't remove it from the directory on disk, it will still show up in search results. What a pain in the ass.
471) USB can be such a piece of crap in Windows. Here's a quote from my DSL modem manual: "If you are using USB, don't plug your cable into your gateway until the installation program prompts you." (Whereas other software requires that you do.) "If you do, Windows will install the wrong drivers and your installation will fail. (This is standard behaviour for Windows..." (no kidding, ha ha!) "...and no harm is done." Except that then you have to "please call Customer Care for help in starting over." What a nightmare.
470) So I have several apps open. I've got VC++, SecureCRT on top of that, and then IE on top of that. When I close the IE window, it goes away just fine, but then a split second later, VC++ is shoved to the top, suddenly covering up SecureCRT. Actually, it seems to be an issue with IE, rather than VC++ because the apps underneath can be anything, and they will still get rearranged when IE quits. Whatever.
469) I might have mentioned this before, but I love how the Print Preview mode in Word doesn't have a regular close 'X' button, but a button placed elsewhere labeled 'Close'. Like people aren't quitting Word entirely by accident because of that.
468) I'm reading a message in Outlook. There's a hypertext link in the message. I right-click on the link. Copy is grayed out. Hello?
467) Have you ever looked at a long string of binary digits and tried to count over to like the 10th one? So wouldn't it be nice if apps (e.g.: the Calculator) had some tick marks or something to help? I mean, did the people writing the Calculator even ever use it?
466) Why is it that sometimes, IE just doesn't offer any completions of stuff I'm typing into the address bar? But like a few minutes ago, it did? I didn't clear any caches, it is just that IE has decided to completely go out to lunch.
465) Yeah! I love how IE just decides to ignore me clicking on the stop button, and keeps the globe spinning and stuff! Yeah!
464) When you are typing stuff in IE, the mouse cursor isn't hidden. It is hard for me to decide if that is worse than things like Outlook where the cursor just flickers like a son of a gun while you type. Whatever. As if the Mac wasn't Doing the Right Thing back in the eighties. Kill everyone.
463) IE does this thing where you can be clicking on something, or hitting the enter key after entering stuff in a form, and nothing happens. I think it is because it is still downloading other crap on the page (images, whatever) because if I go and click on it or hit enter again a few seconds later, it seems to hear me. Piece of crap.
462) So why doesn't the mouse scroll wheel work in the Address Book in Outlook? Whatever.
461) I bring up the Outlook Address Book. I do some search that apparently takes for ever. All of Outlook is locked up with the hourglass wait cursor showing. I hit ESC a few times to try and interrupt the process. Nothing happens, it is totally out to lunch. Then, after a while, the Address Book goes away. Maybe it finally got done or something? Who knows. All I know is now the Address Book is gone, and if it had any results, those are gone also. Whatever. Just a crappy setup, through and through.
460) Why aren't there methods to handle Win32 SYSTEMTIME structures more easily? Having to convert through a bunch of other types (FILETIME, ULARGE_INTEGER) to do date math really sucks butt.
459) Okay. This is under Win2K, so you know they've had enough time to notice this and fix it. I mean, it isn't like this is the very first time they've implemented this: So the advanced volumes control panel lets you set the balance of the available channels. The icons for the left and right are not spaced properly, so it looks like a centered balance is actually favoring the right. Whatever. Idiots.
458) So I tell Outlook to AutoArchive stuff. So that stuff is now on my local hard drive rather than on the MS Exchange server, right? That's all fine and dandy, but now how the heck am I supposed to be able to get at my archived messages? They don't show up in Outlook any more. So that completely sucks. What I want is to have the stuff on my local drive, perhaps with the message bodies compressed, yet still listed in my Outlook folders. Seems like that would be, you know, useful? Maybe you can already do it; the whole UI is just nutty. The help talks about reimporting the archived files, but it doesn't say if they are shoved back onto the server, or what. Update: Oh, hey, through trial-and-error (certainly not through the Outlook help) I figured out that you can just do File/Open/.pst and it will show the things to you, and it doesn't seem to have copied them to the server, that I can tell, anyway.
457) Every time I use MS PhotoDraw I wonder why they couldn't have sprung for the slightly more expensive quality crack to smoke while writing the thing. What a flying piece of excrement. Here's a good one: I paint a bunch of stuff. I then switch color and brush and all that, and paint some more. I'm trying to get it to constrain the brush motions by holding down the shift key while painting and, well, that doesn't work. Okay, great. So already it is a piece of turd. So then I hit Ctrl-z to undo the stuff... and it doesn't just undo the stroke I made, it undoes everything I've done up to that point. What the frikkin' heck is going on with this thing? So, then, I'm trying to paint stuff again and nothing is happening. Apparently, I have to click on some little button in some little floating window to get back into paint mode. God only knows what freakish mode I was in anyway. This whole thing is such complete and utter insanity! Argh!
456) So I've got two IE windows up, one on top of the other. I try to click on the title bar of the one in back. It doesn't move. The one in front is still alive, though. So I wait for a little bit, figuring maybe the back window is waiting on something to load for its page. Doesn't improve. Eventually, I move the front window out of the way to see what is going on... and discover that there is a dialog box generated by the second window that is stealing all the focus and that is why I can't click on it to come to the front. This is insanity.
455) So (at least in Win2k) the File Explorer starts up with the My Documents folder expanded in the left-hand panel. I pretty much never use that folder, especially at work. It would make a lot more sense if the Explorer either remembered what stuff I had open when I closed it (that would actually get pretty annoying pretty quickly) or, really, better, it should just let me specify what I want things to look like when it starts up.
454) Wow. I'd heard people say that MS Project was a tub of crap, but I didn't realize just how right on those opinions were. I'm not even trying to do anything complicated, and already I find it sucking. In particular, the Task Sheet looks like a regular old spreadsheet, yet the user interface for it seems to be significantly different from Excel. That seems like a bad idea to me.
1. There are text fields with entries that go beyond their visible width in the Task Sheet. I'd really just like to turn on word wrapping, rather than having the text get chopped off. Apparently, there isn't any option to just have the vertical space of a cell automatically resize to fit the text. Instead you have to manually readjust them every time the text size changes. Argh!
2. Like, I just wanted to list all the tasks assigned to a single person:
  1. The first thing I tried to do was select the column with all the names in it, and sort that (by right-clicking on the column heading and choosing "Sort by..."), hopefully causing the rest of the sheet to sort with them. No luck; nothing budged.
  2. So I tried selecting the whole sheet, and then sorting that column I wanted everything else to be based on. However, when I right-click on the column heading this time, the menu that comes up is completely different and doesn't contain anything about sorting.
  3. I'm discouraged by all that, so I figure, well, the least I can do is move that column I'm interested in, which is the last column on the right of the sheet, to be the first column so I can see it more easily along with the other important info. (Guess I could also shrink down all the widths of the previous columns, but whatever.) Yet, for the life of me, I can't figure out how to just grab that column and move it over to the left. Yes, I do have "Allow cell drag and drop" turned on. Also, it looks like it has a vertical split-bar, but not a horizontal one.
  4. So then I decide maybe I can get a new view of the sheet via some filtering. So there are the Reports (oh my god would you look at those pathetic, lame, pointless, stupid, ugly, annoying, out of place, just plain bad icons?) and one is something about Assignments, so I choose that to try and get a list of things gathered by person. It works, but what I end up getting is not a new spreadsheet but something that is just a printable document. Like, you are in a completely new and pretty much powerless mode where all you can do is zoom in and maybe print. Oh, you can move around but you don't even have a Hand tool; you have to use the stupid scroll bars. Whatever. Also, it listed every task as taking 1 day (when they clearly take various lengths in the Task Sheet). What is up with that?
453) Sometimes, it is nice that IE tries to remember where you last had it positioned when you quit, and then tries to start up there the next time you run it. But sometimes (like how I use it at work) it is really quite annoying.
452) I love how some WSA error codes use underscores and others do not.
451) Oh, this is just too precious. The front page of the MS web site today generates a JavaScript error. And this is running in IE. Whatever.
450) It is pretty funny, but after installing WinME over Win98 it all just seemed so much more solid. I eventually figured out that the main thing was that the default desktop background color was a much better blue that lent a feeling of stability to the whole thing. Weird. So whoever made that change was definitely on to something. Well done!
449) When I am viewing the contents of some directory in the Open File dialog, and I'm viewing by Details, and I click on the Modified column heading, why on earth does it give me the oldest files first? Why wouldn't you figure that the most common thing is for someone to be looking for the newest file? I mean, I think I literally never look for the oldest file. I'm always looking for the newest one. This kills me. It is even better when the little column headings don't have the little arrow to try and show you if it is sorting ascending or descending. Of course, I think the arrows are pretty horrible little icons to have in the first place because the sense of big-to-small or up-and-down can vary on the viewer. Like, I always think the arrows are backward.
448) When you copy text in Windows apps, you can end up copying extended ASCII (or worse). That type of stuff doesn't paste well into older systems. So I think there should be a "Paste Stripped" command, or something of that ilk. Come on people. I'm sure it's not as if I'm the only person to have seen this problem in the many years that Windows, in all its forms, has been around.
447) In Outlook, you can't see the cursor position in a message you are reading. Sure, you can set the position, you just can't see it. I guess because the document is supposed to be read-only. (Why it has to be read-only I don't know. When I change things in mh-e, it just asks me if I really want those changes.) They should let you see the damned cursor so you can get some feed back when you are trying to set marks for making a selection. Argh.
446) I love how Win2k can completely lock up and I have to just reboot the system using the hardware reset switch. Games do it. Playing some videos does it. Yeah!
445) Given that Windows (in all its forms) is such a crashy piece of crap, you'd think the Add/Remove Programs control panel would have the option of showing you things in the order they were installed. I mean, because you are probably going to install something, try it out, see Windows lock up, reboot, and want to immediately uninstall whatever that was.
444) All I want is a line chart in Excel. I select the 2 columns of data I want to graph, and use the Chart Wizard. It wants to mark the X axis with 1, 80, 159, 238, 317, 396, ... rather than, what is patently obvious to me what anybody would want, 0, 10, 20, ... or 0, 100, 200, ..., just whatever fits, but starting with zero and using some human-sensible increments. It is mind boggling to me that someone must have thought that whacked numbering algorithm was a good thing?!
443) You can resize (at least some) dialog boxes, yet they do not have the maximize button in their title bar. You know, like every other resizable window. It would be useful when you have a ton of files from which you are trying to choose.

442) Oh, crap. I 'upgraded' to the latest Windows Media Player 7 crap. I used to just have a plain CD player in Win2k that worked. Now I have some super bloated piece of crap that doesn't even have all the basic functionality of the original CD player. (Instead, it has ways for companies to track me with cookies.)
1. The most egregious thing is that it actually freezes playing CDs every now and then. Oh, and also now when I'm not playing anything I get 'pops' now and then on the speakers. The old player sure didn't do completely dumb-ass suck-ass stuff like that. I mean, we're talking the most absolutely fundamental things a CD player should be able to do!
2. I hit play. I hit the window-minimize button. The window goes away. A second later it comes right back because the player has actually started playing? What in the heck? What?
3. The old player would show the track number as part of its window title, which means you could see it in the task bar. That was nice. 'Tis no longer thus.
4. I don't understand how I get it to loop a single track. In the old player, there was a list of play modes and one was "loop the playing track" but that is gone. Maybe it is now all about checkboxes and things. Whatever, it sucks and I hate it. "Change? We fear change."
5. I don't know how to get it to just show me the remaining time of the current track.
6. It doesn't have an eject button that I've seen.
7. I put in a CD. I bring up WMP. I press play. Nothing happens; it is too busy doing stuff like spinning up the cd or trying to find info on the net to even update the UI to show that it did hear me and is going to play. Also, it has that most horrific of UI widgets, the button that toggles something and changes its image. So you never know if the image on the button is what the button will do, or what the system is already doing.
While I'm at it, I should mention that I wish you could right-click on the task bar entry for the player and select things like Pause/Play right there, rather than having to bring up the full window and all that.
441) The old CD player in Win2k would bug the heck outta me because if it doesn't find the album on the Internet, it bring up a dialog telling you that, and you can't tell it to not bring one up. So then say that the CD player is buried under a bunch of other windows, I go click on its entry in the task bar to bring it up, and rather than getting the CD window I get the dialog box. So then I dismiss the dialog box and I have to go click on the entry in the task bar again. What a flying piece of crap.
440) So you can view things as thumbnails in Windows Explorer. It chops off the file name if it is too long, though. You can mouse-over the thumbnail and it will give you a tool tip display of some information about the image... but it doesn't show you the full file name! Stooopid!
439) I love how there are at least 2 different styles of text completion in MS apps. There's the IE address field style, where as you are typing you can hit the Tab key to complete the current selection, or use the up and down arrow keys to pick others. Then, there's the completely incompatible and stupid and hateful thing like in Open File or file Search (what used to be Find), where hitting Tab just moves you to the next field.
438) I go to print something in "Imaging for Windows(R) Preview, Provided to Microsoft by Eastman Software, Inc, A Kodak Business" and there's the regular printer driver and then the text file output printer driver. When I switch between the two, the size of the entire dialog box changes, even though the inner border doesn't move. So the OK and Cancel buttons move around for no good reason. Weird.
437) So I'm trying to get a new driver. So the web page it is on requires me to enable ActiveSpooge. So rather than turn it on for everything, I try to enter the web site as a Trusted Site. Of course, even after doing that and hitting Ctrl-F5, it doesn't run the application on the page. Whatever.
436) I love the way IE's security settings have things listed in crack smoking order like High Security / Low Security / Medium Security. Whatever.
435) What a complete and utter flying piece of excrement. In Outlook, if you are working on a message you can hit F4 to find some text. (Of course, that is totally different from, say, Visual Studio - I sure wish MS could get its act together for something as simple as unifying their keyboard shortcuts across applications, but I guess that is way too much to ask for.) However, if you are just looking at messages in the main app window, there is, apparently, no shortcut. The absolute kicker is that F4 doesn't seem to be bound to anything. Like, I press F4 and nothing happens. So why in the hell, if it is in fact a free agent, didn't they just bind it to Find?! Ye gods.
434) MS Outlooks just goes off into la-la land every now and then. It puts up the hour glass wait cursor, and I can't do anything. It is particularly funny that it does that right in the middle of me dragging a Shortcut entry around, and doesn't come back for a full minute, so for all I know I've dragged that Shortcut into the fourth circle of hell and I will never see it again. Whatever. Piece of complete and utter crap.
433) So I'm downloading a streamed version of some game demo video in Windows Media, in IE. What a piece of crap.
1. It doesn't buffer enough, so it ends up having to stop and buffer and then play a little and then stop and buffer some more, etc. I'm on a friggin' fast corporate network, my laptop has 172 meg free... so why the hell won't it just buffer enough to not freeze up?
2. It doesn't actually save any buffered data, so if I rewind it sits there doing nothing (as far as the UI shows me) but I guess it is frantically trying to re-download from the point I just moved to. Like it couldn't have just been keeping stuff in part of the 172 megs free (we're talking RAM, not even disk space) on my machine?
3. It finally starts playing again, only now the images are still frames. Nothing is moving. It gets to some iframe type thing and updates the screen, but only to a static picture; there is no animation at all. Whatever.
432) So you open up the History frame in IE. So you mouse over things. So it puts up a tooltip that is really dumb (because you are pointing at a folder labeled, say, "ebay (ebay.com)" and the suck ass tooltip says "pages visited at ebay.com" as if that wasn't obvious) and blocks the next thing in the list making it hard to read things. Argh.
431) For some cockamamie reason, IE now no longer shows the status bar. Sure, I can turn it on, but the next time I start IE the status bar isn't activated. Whatever.
430) I enter an URL into MSIE. It start to try and load the page. While it is doing that, I try to drag the window. It moves, but then all of a sudden, while I'm still trying to drag it, the page loads and bang! the window suddenly snaps back to where it started out, as if I'd never tried to move it at all. Freaky.
429) If you enter comments for a field in Excel, they will pop up in a little yellow box as you mouse over things. However, the yellow box seems to be (at least in this spreadsheet someone gave me to fill out) clipped to the document's window. They aren't even clipped to the application's window. Also, they don't try to draw themselves on the left if there isn't enough space on the right. Basically, they are bloody stupid pieces of crap.
428) In the File Explorer, When I hit the little widgety thing in the Details view to sort by modification date, why on Earth would anybody think that I wanted the oldest ones first? This is so completely never the case that I wanna slap them all silly upside the head and ears.
427) So why isn't the VC++ Source Browser tool dockable?!?! Hello? I guess because that would be just a little too useful? I mean, you can't even just have it lying around, it all goes away as soon as you use it like once to find something. Stooopid.
426)
425) I would really like to have the spell check in Word just show me the list of things it didn't like, and then I could go through that list and only change the ones I wanted. I really don't like having this whole interactive thing when I know there will be lots of doofy things tripping it up.
424) So you can have address aliases in Outlook. What if I just want to see it expanded before I'm going to send the message? How the heck do I do that? Can I do that? What if I just want it to always uniqify the list of recipients? How do I do that? Can I do that? This thing is just way too unkempt.
423) Maybe I've said it before, but I'll say it again: IE's UI for Organize Favorites is a complete and utter piece of excrement and it kills me any time I have to try and use it. Lobotomized monkeys designed and implemented it.
422) Paraphrasing: "The application could not be terminated. If it is being debugged, please stop the debugger." And just an OK button. Uh, okay, but what if there isn't any debugger running it? Grn. Why can't I just friggin' kill the thing? (Maybe it is owned by something that has higher access rights than me, so I don't have permission? If that's the case then how about just telling me that?
421) Sure, I don't know what I'm doing in JavaScript, but should it really cause IE to utterly crash and seg fault and burn and die a horrible death?
420) Why is it that in Outlook you sometimes see attachments as file icons embedded in the message body, and other times you only get them in the little drop down menu? That little drop down menu is a huge pain in the ass because you cannot select multiple files to save at once. So, if you get a longish list (like I'm getting data 6 files to run through my program) you have to go through this laborious process of clicking on the menu, picking your item, hitting the save button, clicking on the menu, picking your next item, hitting the save button, ad. nauseum.
419) The Outline mode in Word is just plain broken. I type stuff in, and it changes the font and style as I'm doing various levels of indentation. Okay, is is needless and really ugly, but whatever, I can deal with it I guess. So then, when I am editing the text sometimes if I delete some sub topic, the font and style of its parent topic completely change, only, they don't change back to anything they were before, they change into some completely new and different look. And from then on, that parent topic's style won't ever change again. Freakish.
418) So I try to close windows so the entries in the task bar get more room. However, the task bar doesn't always take advantage of the new space and resize the buttons. If I move the separator between it and the Quick Launch bar, then it will resize them. Whatever.
417) All I want is to be able to turn of Win2k's absolutely out-of-this-worldly annoying "hey, let me flash everything, let me flash the entry in the Task Bar, let me flash the title bar of the window, let me go go go!" tendencies. I really loathe that.
416) How in the holy hell do I get that piece of crap Outlook to stop trying to select a whole word when I start the selection in the middle of it? I thought using the Ctrl key in IE was supposed to let you select portions of things, but that doesn't seem to work in Outlook. Boy, I sure do so completely dislike MS products.
415) Microsoft is so completely screwed in the head. In Word, if you have text selected, it doesn't get put into the Find dialog by default. VC++, on the other hand, does the other completely wrong thing by putting the word into the dialog box, even when there is no selection. It just merrily puts the word that your cursor is nearest in there. I cannot begin to understand who thinks either of these behaviours is good or right.
414) The way Word handles bulleted paragraphs is pretty stupid. You cannot select the 1, 2, 3 or A, B, C that is at the start of a section. I can sort of understand that, since the program is supposed to be the one updating it. Then, if you are copying some text from a bulleted paragraph, it will try to include the 1, 2, 3 or whatever in the clipboard. So, if you are just trying to copy the first word in a section you end up getting it's 1, 2, 3. So if you are trying to Find and Replace the first word, you copy that first word, bring up the Find and Replace dialog, paste the text into the 'Find what' field... and have the 1, 2, 3 crap from the paragraph. But I'm not supposed to be able to change the 1, 2, 3 since that should be under program control! It is all just so completely broken.
413) Word has a tendency to not retain formatting info. Like, I'm trying to Search and Replace some plain text with some colored text, and when it replaces hits they aren't colored.
412) From the MSDN Library, July 2000 docs, example code:
/* Attempt to read in 10 bytes: */ count = fread( buffer, sizeof( char ), 100, stream ); ...ha ha, nice. Sheesh.
411) So I installed WindowsME at home. It comes with some Windows Updater thing that starts off set to constantly pester you. Nice. So I decide to try it out; it goes and downloads a bunch of stuff and then asks me if I want to install it. So I figure I should see what it is going to install. It lists the item, but there is absolutely no detailed description of just exactly what in the hell it does or will do to my machine. So I'm really unhappy. Definitely going to turn this turd off.
410) You can drag the Task Bar to a new place on your screen. Like, it can be on the side of the screen, or on the top. Or, if you have two monitors, you can drag it over to the other desktop (but you cannot have one that spans both monitors, or, what would actually be nice, one per monitor). The kicker is that when you are dragging it, there is absolutely no visual feedback. So one time I apparently moved it entirely by accident, and had no idea what the hell had happened; I didn't even notice the problem until later on and was at a loss as to explain how it got that way, or how to undo it!
409) I just love the way Outlook freezes up for like five seconds every fifteen. Without any kind of explanation for why. Not even a bloody wait cursor. Oh, wait, and then it starts to turn the entire machine to molasses (even though the Task Manager doesn't show Outlook as sucking up really any big CPU time... whatever), and then stops responding at all, and I have to kill it. Yes! Sweet! Quality software!
408) Why doesn't Windows tell me that it can't rename a file as soon as I start trying to rename it, rather than after I've done all the steps? What a pain in the ass stupid thing.
407) So when you are doing Save As, you don't get a text field with the full path. So say I've opened something from C:x/y/z/foo/bar/baz and I just want to Save As C:x/y/z/bar/bar/baz, I have to walk all the way up, then all the way back down to the right place. If there were a text field, I could just edit the foo and be done.
406) Man, trying to get Word to deal with numbered paragraphs is kind of a huge pain in the ass. It doesn't want to let me restart the ordering sometimes - the radio button for that choice is just grayed out. Though, it is grayed out with the 'restart' option chosen. But, even so, it still doesn't restart the numbering! I had to screw with it like four times before it would finally renumber them! Ugh. Oh, man, and it is like completely arbitrary: other times it only took two runs through the damned dialog box, and yet another time it actually worked off the bat. What a piece of crap-ola.
405) What the heck was so wrong with Shift-Reload that IE has to use Ctrl-F5 instead?
404) The way IE remembers everything you typed into the Address field for Auto Completion sucks because if you don't want something any more, or you entered a mistake, then you have to clear out the entire dictionary.
403) When Outlook turns an email address from text into a finalized 'valid' address, you cannot then go edit the text of that address. Outlook treats it as a unit, no longer as text that allows you to place a cursor in it. Holy cow.
402) Is there anything like Emacs's ^X^X? I'm so annoyed.
401) So I'm trying to copy files over using MS Windows Networking. I'm in an environment with a hell of a lot of machines. Thus, browsing around to get to the other machine is kinda slow and a pain. It turns out that the machine I'm copying to is not shared, so I go and turn sharing on. Does it show up for the source computer? Of course not. I try to guess how it would be named: e.g.: when I pick another computer that actually is listed, the dialog box lists the path to it as just e.g.: "My Documents on xyz-rduke-m" so then I figure I should be able to replace "xyz-rduke-m" with the name of the now shared machine... Well, that doesn't work. Whatever.
400) Boy, I sure am glad that IE forgets the settings I had in the Find dialog whenever I dismiss it and then bring it back. (At first I thought it was only because I was loading new pages, but no, it happens any time.) What a complete and utter piece of crap.
399) I really dislike how Word puts up a dialog box after it finishes a "Replace All," telling you what it did. That status should just appear as text in the Replace dialog box. That way, I wouldn't have to click on two buttons just to get back to my document, as it were.
398) I just got a Trackball Explorer. As usual, it takes me only fifteen minutes to discover all sorts of things about it that are just wrong for me. (Although, I think my hand is starting to conform to it now after a few more days of using it... Doesn't this sound like how all Microsoft products work: they slowly force you to fit them?)
1. It is all curvy and stuff, presumably in an attempt to be oh so ergonomic, but then it isn't tilted away from the user, so you end up having to bend your wrist to use it. Doesn't seem good.
2. The overall size of the thing is too narrow for me. If I'm using it all day long, I have to use the muscles in my hand to keep it slightly clenched up to hold/grab the trackball. (Maybe I could learn the tai chi way to hold it or something, whatever. Or maybe the whole unit should just have a lead block in it so I wouldn't feel like it would keep moving around if I don't sort of grab it.) I wish it were just all around wider so my hand could relax more when using it.
3. The way it feels most comfortable for me is apparently not the way they ever expected anybody to use it, because the buttons are then placed so I'd have to press them with a knuckle of my thumb, rather than being able to press it with the thumb tip. (I eventually did adjust to it.)
4. It suffers from the same problem I have with the Logitech optical trackball I have at home: there isn't enough friction on the ball at low speeds, so it is really hard to hold the pointer steady over anything. I tend to have to let go of the trackball when I'm going to click on something. It's pretty much a huge pain in the ass, and probably not great for RSI. And, don't ever try to draw anything freehand with it. (Turns out it can get dirty pretty quickly, which slows it down. At least it doesn't make it skip and wedge, like all those Kensington pieces of crap.)
397) The way Outlook tries to handle when items switch from unread to read status really really really sucks a lot of stinky ass.
396) You know, I pretty much don't ever want to debug crappy JavaScript on a web page I'm visiting in IE. Oh, wait, there's an 'Advanced' setting that lets me turn that off. So was it on by default? That would be pretty dumb. Oh, and look at this: I turn it off and it still gives me the bloody error dialogs. What a flying piece of excrement. What, do I have to restart IE or something? What? WHAT?
395) Word is such a complete and utter flying tub of crap. I'm doing Find and Replace.
1. It keeps moving the dialog box around on me! Instead, it should be moving the scroll position of the window so I can see the text, duh. That way I wouldn't have to seek the Replace button every time!
2. To add insult to injury: I can easily click faster than it can respond. I'm not even trying to click really fast, I'm just clicking at a normal rate. I mean, I'm even looking to make sure I really want to replace whatever is selected, so I can't be clicking that fast at all and yet the piece of excrement can't even keep up.
3. Here's the kicker: I can click on the button faster than it can respond, but the button still flashes like I clicked on it, which is supposed to mean that it actually did the thing I'm telling it to do when I click. But it hasn't, even though there is still that feedback from the button. Oy veh.
4. Oh, yeah, note that if I use the Enter key instead of the mouse button, it can keep up. Whatever.
394) Somehow, the recycle bin on my machine has disappeared. God only knows why.
393) Say you have multiple IE windows open. Say one of them has crappy JavaScript or JScript or ECMASCript or whatever you want to call it. So then say the dialog comes up asking you if you want to debug it. Say you hit 'Yes' either on purpose or, quite possibly, by accident. When you quick the debugger, all of IE will go away. All your windows. Not just the one that had the crappy broken script. Sure, I understand that the debugger is connecting to the whole IE process, but it still looks retarded to a user.
392) I just want to copy the name, or label - God only knows what the difference might be - of an attachment in Outlook. I right-click on the attachment and choose Properties. It brings up a dialog box that shows the Label and the Size. I try to right-click on the text of the label so I can choose Copy from the menu, but instead it puts up a message telling me "Allows you to specify a new name for the label of the attachment." As if that makes any sense. What is the damned difference between the name and the label? Why isn't there just a right-click menu? (Yeah, yeah, you can use ^C to copy the text.)
391) I have a network drive mapped and set to reconnect whenever I log in. So I log in and am using the File Explorer. I'm drilling down to find a directory on my hard drive. I'm just about to get the thing I'm looking for when all of a sudden the system decides that it has to repaint the File Explorer because it has finally figured out that the mapped drive isn't available. So basically the Explorer resets to what it was like when I first started it, thereby losing the path to the stuff I was just about to get.
390) Wow. The Search functionality of the file system is a flying piece of pig turd. I just want to search for #define BLAH and it blows up. It says that the volume hasn't been indexed or something. I suspect the # is confusing it? Yes, yes it is. Also, I really want the space in there to be a tab, and there isn't any obvious way of getting special character matching codes in the search.
389) God, I hate the file system Search. I think I've already noted how broken the UI is for using previous search terms (there is no menu until you start typing). So today I discover that it is even worse: I'm typing in something that starts off like previous search terms, so it decides to show the pop-up list of previous search terms. That list is now over the actual 'Search Now' button (hah, as opposed to a button that lets you 'Search Later' or 'Search Yesterday'? I mean, what the hell crack are these people on?) so you can't click on it to actually do your search. I thought maybe if I clicked in the text field, the pop-up would go away because the explicit click in the text field would tell it "I don't want you stupid pop-up menu." But, no, that doesn't work. You have to click somewhere far, far away to get the damned menu to get lost already.
388) Let's say you get a message in Outlook with an attachment. So you want to save the attachment to disk. You now have the Outlook window with your message in it, a dialog that asked you if you wanted to open or save the file, and then on top of that you have the Save As dialog. Now, those dialogs are modal so you cannot get back to Outlook. Nor can you move the middle dialog. You can only move the Save As one. So if there is something in the message that you wanted to refer to when naming the saved file, well, you are right out of luck because it is obscured by immovable stuff.
387) All I want to do in Word is have a table with multiple columns where each row is auto numbered. However, it seems that it wants to number each and every cell. Terrific.
386) You know, the File Explorer's right-hand panel just doesn't make it clear enough what folder you are in. If you are down deep in the hierarchy you really have to scan through the list of folders to find the one you are currently in. I think the currently open folder and name should be colored differently or something as well as being the little open icon.
385) In the Paint Desk Accessory, if you have, say, the Pencil tool chosen and then you choose the Eye Dropper tool you only get one click. You click with the Eye Dropper and then boom! you are back to the pencil. Sure, every now and then that might have been useful, but actually it mostly pisses me off. What if I picked the wrong color? Now I have to go choose the Eye Dropper again. What a pain in the ass!
384) The Outline Mode in Word doesn't ever let you change the margins. You can't even get the Ruler.
383) When you go to change between landscape and portrait layout for the page, there is a button labeled "Default..." Now, when I saw that I figured it would be used to reset everything in the dialog box back to some default. Turns out it takes the current settings and updates the default to use those, so it is like completely the other way 'round from how I would expect it to work. I think it was poorly designed.
382) I keep getting this dumb ass dialog box that says I've already got like 12 clipboard items and that it will blow them all out with my new one, or something like that. (The Office Clipboard can only hold 12 items. Copying this item will add it to the end and discard the first item. Do you want to copy it anyway?) I cannot believe the utter stupidity of this. I cannot comprehend where this is coming from, or why anybody anywhere would ever have considered this a good thing. Complete and utter insanity.
381) So in Word, to change from Portrait to Landscape for your document you don't go to File / Page Setup / Layout. No, that would probably make too much sense. Instead, you have to go to File / Page Setup / Paper Size, if you can believe that.
380) Word really doesn't want to let me put a table into a bulleted paragraph the way I want to. I just want there to be a bullet, possibly indented, and then have that bullet's entry be a table. Whenever I try to insert the table at the bullet, it ends up drawing the table (get this!) around the bullet! Furthermore, the key commands have completely switched so that things which work in bulleted paragraphs now do something completely different to the table (e.g.: Tab, Shift-Tab).
379) I don't know what dictionary is installed for use by Word, but the whole spelling thing is so mind-blowingly lame. E.g.: it recognizes that I made an error with 'occurances' but it fails to offer any suggestion for a correction. Emacs and ISpell correctly suggest 'occurrences' no problem. Come on.
378) Word has a command Table / Insert / Rows Above which only inserts one row. Pinko idiots.
377) Not only are the pre-defined table formats horrendous (they obviously never read anything by Tufte), the controls for coloring the table yourself are complete crap. How the hell do I change the color of the grid lines? Should the interface really be this obtuse? The problem is that they sliced it from the perspective of "Borders and Shading..." and didn't include anything in the Table menu. I think it is okay to have some redundancy so that people can find the command they are looking for more easily. Basically, the program is bloated and tries to be everything to everybody and ends up just being really unfriendly (like me).
376) There should be an Apply button in the Borders and Shading... dialog box, duh. Better yet, it could optionally be a floating tool palette that would have immediate effect on the selection.
375) I like how Word decides to change my View whenever the hell it wants. I was mucking with the coloring and shading of a table and it switched me from the Normal to the Web Layout View for no good reason. Or, when I pick Table / Draw Table, it brings up a tool palette and switches me to the Print Layout View. What the hell? This is insanity.
374) Editing tables in Word is just completely broken. If you try to cut out rows, rather than the rows going away they become blank. When you try to paste in rows, rather than inserting themselves as new rows and moving down all the following ones, they just overwrite already existing data. I guess they've never heard about the Hippocratic Oath.
373) So I can pick a custom color in Word for, say, shading a region. How the hell do I ever get that color again short of remembering the RGB values and typing those in?!?! Can I even select a set of non-contiguous rows in a table so I could apply the custom color to them all at once? Ctrl-Click certainly doesn't do it.
372) So I'm trying to make a table in Word (Click'n'Clack: "Well, there's your problem!") where the entries are automatically numbered. I used the auto numbering paragraph formatting on the table. That seems to work, but the table ends up with all sorts of leading whitespace. I do the Table / AutoFit / FitToContents, and the right side is fine but the left side is still Chock Full O' Space (sensitive text de-rezzed). Ugh!
371) Yeah! PhotoDraw's View / Zoom menu doesn't have any way to set an arbitrary zoom. You have to go to the zoom tool in the toolbar (so I guess that means you should never get rid of that, huh?).
370) I'm so glad that MS PhotoDraw uses a completely freakish and non-standard dialog for choosing a document to work on.
369) So in MS PhotoDraw, you can get a list of, say Designer Effects. The list is huge. It is really long. So you scroll down through it and find something to try. You click on it. You decide that the effect isn't what you want. So you Undo. At that point, not only does the effect go away, but the list through which you were browsing suddenly jumps all the way back to the top! Argh! Didn't anybody actually try this damned thing out before shipping it?
368) I guess you have no control over like the Designer Effects in PhotoDraw. Like, right-clicking over the effect icon certainly doesn't give you any options. Oh, wait, the "What's This" entry tells you where to go. You know, rather than just putting the command in the right-click menu to begin with. And with this they expect to make a profit?
367) The calculator desk accessory sucks: sometimes when you are clicking to enter values, the button you click on doesn't flash or anything to indicate that your click was accepted, although the entry does appear in the data field. This is annoying when you are trying to enter binary values like 10000000 because it is hard to see that a new 0 was ever added (the display resolution is high, the font used by the calculator is fixed and small).
366) This is killing me. The hierarchical menu stuff sucks ass because it doesn't give you enough room to breathe with the mouse, as it were. I want it to:
1. Not show sub menus until I've clicked on their parent entry.
2. Not get rid of the sub menu until I've explicitly clicked elsewhere.
365) I've upgraded to WinME at home. It still mostly sucks, of course. Like, if you have 2 entries for one device in the System Properties / Device Manager tab, you can't look at the details for each side-by-side because they are all modal dialogs. So figuring out if the two entries are a mistake or what is kinda stupid annoying. Duh.
364) You can have what is known as a "Multi-Function Parent" in the Win95/98/ME System Properties / Device Manager tab. Like, my sound card does all sorts of emulations as well as being the game port, so it is a MFP. If you decide you want to uninstall the drivers (say, because your piece of crap Gravis joystick keeps losing its mind about how it is centered, like mine does, and Gravis tells you to try reinstalling everything, including the game port hardware) you are actually supposed to do them in some magic order - otherwise, you can end up in a situation where the system won't let you remove a driver because it says some other driver it depends on must be dealt with first. It doesn't show or tell you any of this up front, of course, and it can confuse itself pretty easily, so I've ended up in situations where I've already removed the dependency but it doesn't realize that and so I'm left with drivers I can't uninstall short of entirely reinstalling Windows. God, hell.
363) So I'm running Win2k and today it decided to lock up like two or three times. Heck, it is even Win2k Server. Isn't that supposed to be stable or something? You know, so you can run it as a server? Sheesh. I suspect both times it was something about playing video (once in Windows Media Suck Player, once because of a game intro).
362) Why won't Word let me have the ruler when I'm in outline mode?
361) Word does this thing where if I click-drag to select text, and I go past the end of the paragraph (or, in this case, item of an outline), the whole thing becomes selected rather than from where I started the drag. What bloody super genius thought of that?
360) Word can't even draw its outline widgets properly.
359) I just want Word to stop underlining things it doesn't like. I've tried turning off all the options like that I can find, but it is still doing it. God, I hate this thing.
358) Okay. I've got a read-only MS Project file. I futz with it in Project and then go to save it. It tells me that I can't because it is read-only. So then I use the File Explorer to make the file not just read-only. Unfortunately, Project doesn't seem to realize that it is no longer read-only because I still get the error that I can't overwrite it. What a piece of crap this whole Windows thing is. The absolute kicker is that when I right-click on the file from Project's Save dialog, the properties indicate that it is not read-only. So for some reason Project refuses to update its view of the file system.
357) So I go to print a subset of pages from a Word document and I get a pretty screwy dialog box: "For example," ... well, for example what?!
356) I sure wish Word would remember the zoom setting I used for a document, even when that document is read-only.
355) So Word doesn't have a hierarchical menu for View / Zoom. Instead you have to bring up a dialog box. Whatever.
354) I love how every MS app has a subtly different UI for common things. Excel doesn't use Word keyboard editing commands when entering text. Word probably doesn't use Excel style anything when entering a table. Project certainly doesn't.
353) I want Outlook to start with My Shortcuts open, not the Outlook shortcuts.
352) I like how the recent documents in an application's File menu tend to be listed from most-to-least recent, but in the Desktop / Start / Documents menu they are listed alphabetically.
351) Excel needs a way to paste a block of cut cells such that they insert, but they insert entire rows or columns. Right now, they only displace the cells they would have overwritten.
350) In Word, when you are editing a table you can "Insert Rows" (note the plurality) yet it only inserts a single row.
349) When I get help in Excel (or Word, or whatever), why isn't the text field the thing with the default focus so I can just type in my search?
348) If I type "8*7" into a cell in Excel, why not have an option (I couldn't find one) that would say "hey, I'll automatically turn that into a formula since that is a math operation?"
347) Excel freaks out way too easily when it comes to formatting cells.
346) If you have small cells, when you hit the sigma button in Excel, it expands the cell over other cells. But you are then supposed to be able to select other cells to put into the function. So what if the cells you want are now under the expanded cell?
345) Word is so stupid when it comes to multiple window management. Like, I can't even split a window vertically.
344) So I'm replying to a message in Outlook. I select everything in the message and hit backspace to erase it all. Shouldn't that erase everything? Like, including all the stupid extra formatting crap? So why in the hell does the text I then enter show up in blue? Argh!
343) Sweet. If I turn on the Auditing toolbar in Excel, it takes up an entire row to itself. So, I move it up to the previous row; there's plenty of room for it. That's fine. But if I quit and restart the application, the son of a gun thing is right back on its own damned line. What the hell? Like it is so hard to remember where things where? I mean, why even bother to let me move it in the first place if you aren't going to remember where I put it?
342) Okay, now here's some real genius: Apparently, MS Help doesn't remember what you were looking at the last time you used it. Brilliant. (I guess because that would be so hard to do.)
341) Why can't I copy and paste formatting of cells in Excel? I guess because that would be useful? Oh, wait, I guess what I really mean is: why isn't there a simple menu entry to copy formatting (like Frame Maker had) rather than some obscure "Format Painter" crap? Sheesh. Hey, I know, let's invent all sorts of nutty new tools with silly names to them! Yeah, that's it! Oh, hey, and let's make the way it works really non-intuitive, like making sure users can't just Ctrl-click to change multiple cells. Instead, let's make them double-click on the tool because that would be so much more intuitive. Yeah! That's it!
340) So the format dialog is not resizable. So you can't look at the full text of Custom Number formats in the scrolling list. Sweet!
339) Why doesn't Excel use hierarchical menus so Inserting a Row would suck less? Also, if you are going to have a dialog as it does now, why not at least let me specify how many rows I want to insert?
338) The Format dialog lets you "Use 1000 Separator (,)" but doesn't give you a way to change it to the non-English style '.' separator.
337) Good thing Ctrl-Del (or Ctrl-Backspace, whatever) doesn't delete the previous word when you are editing text in Excel.
336) When I copy and then paste text in Excel, the formatting of that text doesn't seem to always successfully be copied with it. Brilliant.
335) The scrollbar in Excel doesn't do a live scroll. That is, the page doesn't change while you are moving the thumb widget. Yeah, great.
334) Good thing Excel can draw text correctly. Oh, wait...
333) Excel has some retarded idea of having to protect an entire worksheet before you can lock any cells. What the hell? What if there are only a few cells I want to lock? I have to go protect everything, then go and unlock like 90% of the sheet. It would make a hell of a lot more sense to just let me pick some cells, right-click, and choose to un/lock them right there. How hard could that be?
332) There's a link in IE I want to paste, as text, into a message I'm composing in Outlook. I do 'Copy Shortcut' and then when I paste it into the message, rather than getting a link, I'm getting an icon that says it is a link. Retarded.
331) Here's another high quality Outlook error: "The messaging interface has returned an unknown error. If the problem persists, restart Outlook." Ha ha. Ha.
330) I'm sure it was a good idea when they thought of it originally, but the whole thing with Personal vs. Public vs. Mail boxes in Outlook is all screwy. Trying to copy some mail over from my old machine is killing me. Even if it was clear what the hell was going on, I would still be pissed off that, after you go through innumerable Import screens, it only lets you import into already existing folders. It doesn't let you make a new folder there and then. Stooopid.
329) I don't know how the hell it happens, but I can get Win2k into this mode where a window looks like it is active, has focus, and all that (like, the title bar is drawn in blue rather than grey), but then it doesn't actually accept any key input. I have to click on the window and only then does it wake up. In fact, the menus in the window are greyed out until I click on it. It seems to be happening when I minimize a window. I would have expected that the previous app I was using (so that would be the next window on the stack) would become the one with focus, but apparently that isn't how it works. Suck.
328) I want to be able to drag-and-drop a name from the header of a message I'm viewing in Outlook into the To: field of a new message I'm composing in Outlook. Seems like someone would have thought of that by now?
327) Outlook can use funky HTML or RTF, or something, to format messages. That way, you can send funky colored text and stuff. For example, it tries to put excerpted text in blue. So whenever I go to reply to a message, the text that I enter at the top as my reply, for some reason, also starts out formatted in blue. I guess I can't put my cursor before the embedded commands to make the text blue. That is dumb. Furthermore, there isn't some quick and easy way that I've found to just force the formatting of a selected region of text to some super basic utter default, to get rid of the dumb ass blueness. Instead, you have to find some formatting dialog box that will let you change the damned color back to something reasonable, like straight black. Ugh!
326) In the Outlook Address Book, there are fields for the name, phone number, location, title, etc. for a person. These are shown in a standard row and column format. The UI doesn't use the standard view with column headers that you can widen or click on to change the sort order. What the hell?
325) Is it me, or is there no way to reorder the groups (not the shortcuts) in Outlook's shortcut bar?

324) So I'm using a site that is on my internal network. IE is supposed to let me set special security settings for that 'Zone' as opposed to the Internet-at-large zone. Well, I set the local zone's security settings to 'Low', which is the lowest setting there is. So then why do I still get the dialog box telling me there's an ActiveX thing on the page that I've refused to run? Furthermore, why does the security dialog show that my setting is 'Medium-Low'? What a complete and utter festering piece of crap.
323) In Outlook, if you get a new message it shows up in your Inbox and it is displayed in the message body frame. However, it doesn't show up as being read unless you explicitly click on it. I kinda hate that because then you get the annoying "(1)" showing up at the end of folder names. I just want to turn off that whole behaviour so I never have to see the "(1)" again!
322) It looks like if you use Outlook with MS Exchange (and maybe an external pop server in addition, dunno if it is the combination that is screwing it up) when you hit Send/Receive in outlook you get a dialog box saying that it is sending/checking, but:
1. It has no animation or messages to let you know anything is happening.
2. The cursor doesn't change to a wait cursor.
3. The dialog box comes up and I try to move it, and it won't move the first time I click on the title bar. It doesn't seem to matter how long I wait to click on the title bar - the first click is always impotent.
4. Hitting the cancel button doesn't do anything. The dialog box doesn't go away, and the pop dialog box comes up still.
5. Hitting the close button on the dialog makes the dialog go away, but it doesn't cancel the operation that the dialog box is all about.
321) Apparently, the Address Book is modal. If you are getting to it from a letter composition window, it will give you a different Properties sheet for a user than had you gotten to it via the main Outlook window.
320) It looks like you cannot have a background image for your Desktop in Win2k unless you have the Active Desktop crap turned on. Which sucks. Especially because it insists on making the background of all icon text be white, which is really annoying. Oh, wait, I can avoid the Active Desktop if the image is a bmp. Whatever. Good thing it doesn't tell me that anywhere.
319) If WinNT and Win2k are such hot poop on a stick "real" operating systems, then why can an incompatible game lock up the entire machine? Like, Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't do anything. I have to reboot.
318) Okay, so I get this dialog box in IE when looking at the front page of the Microsoft web site!
```
     Error
     A Runtime Error has occurred.
     Do you wish to Debug?

     Line: 268
     Error: Permission denied

     Yes No
     
```
(I assume maybe it happens maybe when I don't allow Active X things to run and the Javascript is trying to talk to some on the page? Whatever.)
317) So I'm viewing a page in IE that has a pop-up list. The width of the widget isn't enough to show the full text of some entries. You'd expect that when you click on the widget to bring up the list you can scroll through, there would be some way to see the full strings; either there would be a horizontal scroll bar, or the pop-up list would be wide enough to show the longest string... Of course, it doesn't do either of those, and so you can't see the rest of the text on those long strings.
316) On Win2k, why does it take like a full second for the volume control slider to appear after I click on the task bar icon? I mean, just think about it for a second or two: when someone wants to change the volume, they usually want to do it right away because either it is too loud or because it is too quiet and they are missing something. Any delay sucks ass.
315) There isn't a way to force the screen saver to begin (like the age-old idea of putting the mouse cursor in a corner of the screen).
314) So say you are in IE and you click on a link to some other Office object type, like a Word document. Say it then has a link in it that you click on. When go back to the Word document the scroll position is lost! Sweet!
313) It is pretty sweet the way the Home button disappears when you go to an FTP site in IE. Sheer, unmitigated genius.
312) In a flagrant break from standard operating procedure, when you click on the Clear button in the Toolbars / Properties / Star Menu Programs, it doesn't bring up a dialog box asking for confirmation. It just goes ahead and deletes the stuff.
311) Wow, this is a nice one! Surely I've run into this before? Anyway, I can be looking at a page with several frames, click on the scroll bar in one and yet the keyboard focus isn't then set to that frame! So if I then hit the Page Down key, some other frame moves! Bloody genius!
310) Did I already mention this? Oh well, it is bugging me again so here it is: you cannot control-click in IE's Organize Favorites dialog to get more than one thing selected. Oh, right, the whole problem is that you can only select one single thing at a time. The other things that suck about it are that:
1. The order of the entries is different from their order when viewed from just the Favorites menu itself.
2. When you delete an entry in the Organize dialog, the whole list tends to be redrawn, and chaos ensues. Whatever.
309) When I add a new entry to the Favorites, why doesn't the folder I put it in show up in the 'compacted' view of the Favorites? Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. There's just no clear rhyme or reason.
308) I'm so glad that I have to reboot my machine (be it Win95, Win98 or even Win2k) when I change from Small Fonts to Large Fonts in the Advanced section of the Display Control Panel.
307) The Paint program that comes with Windows almost does more damage than good. For example:
1. When you are drawing out a selection rectangle the interactive dashed border is double width. Then, when you let go after the dragging operation, the final selection box is not only one pixel wide rather than two, it is also outside the original box you were drawing. From a closer inspection, it would appear the intent was for the dragging to include pixels the interactive border are on, but the final border is to be around the pixels to be effected. Completely screwed.
2. The magnifying glass tool behaves differently from I think just about all other such tools I've ever seen in other paint programs. Usually, you can pick the tool and then click on a spot to zoom into (or out of if you hold down a modifier key). In Paint, however, it activates an area of the toolbar that lets you then choose how much to zoom (1x, 2x, 6x, 8x because 4 is an evil number, I guess). Sometimes, when you pick from those entries the zoom immediately happens - you don't get an opportunity to choose where the zoom is centered. However, sometimes, the zoom doesn't immediately happen. Instead, as you move the mouse cursor around, a rectangle that presumably shows you what will be zoomed into is also shown. Further broken stupid things happen, like having the 1x be hilighted, yet when I click on an unzoomed image it suddenly becomes 2x magnified. Basically, all 'round, the thing is broken. Oh, yeah, and there's no hand tool to help you move around easily. You have to use the scrollbars.
3. The shift key doesn't seem to restrict such things as the eraser to horizontal, vertical and diagonal directions.
4. I'm viewing the image at regular size, and when I try to move a selected region around it has times when it only moves two pixels. If I zoom in I can move it with pixel accuracy. Also, sometimes it lets me to pixel accurate placement at the regular 1x magnification so I don't think it is just my mouse freaking out. Actually, it happens with any cursor placement, be it moving the region or moving the eraser around. Whatever.
306) So why does the Macintosh version of IE 5 have the nice Download Manager, but the Win version doesn't?
305) Oh, this is precious! If you are in the File Explorer, and you are, say, copying a file onto another disk using drag and drop, if the target in the left hand frame is the last entry, when you mouse over it, that whole frame starts to scroll. It doesn't scroll when you move your mouse past the end, it starts to scroll when your cursor is over the target. So if you aren't expecting that, you release the item just as the frame is scrolling, putting the file on the next entry, not the one you actually wanted.

Sweet

304) I'm downloading a huge file. While it is downloading, I clean up some directory structures. When the file is finished downloading, it is to be copied from the temporary IE store (stupid idea to begin with, that? i mean since it uses retarded names) into the final directory which is no longer there. It brings up a dialog box asking me if it should create the directory. I shudder to think what would happen if I hit no - I expect it would have just failed to do anything other than quit without copying the download. Maybe I'm wrong, but I sure as hell am not going to take the chance since so much about Windows leads me to expect it will suck at every opportunity (you know, like copying a shortcut when you drag and drop, rather than actually moving the item in its entirety).
303) The only thing better than one MS application sucking is having two that interact in new and even sukkier ways. I get a JPEG attachment in an email message, so in Outlook I tell it to open it up. It brings up IE with some path to some temporary file on the disk. I quit Outlook. Then, I want to save the picture. So I try Save As..., which gives me some error about how some file cannot be found. I try saving the file in different places, and always get the same error. So that leads me to believe that even though IE already loaded the image and even though the image is staring me in the face and even though IE must have the bloody thing actually in memory, it can't save the image because it stupidly wants to reload the original file, which is now gone because Outlook cleaned up after itself when it exited. So I have to copy the image out, which works just fine and paste it into Paint and save it from there. My lord in heaven.
302) In Win98, you cannot get a listing of file type associations by extension. So I'm trying to map AVI to the Windows Media Player, rather than some left over crappy Diamond media player thing that is somehow still on my machine, even though it doesn't show up in the Add/Remove Programs control panel, but I get an error message saying that the AVI extension is already mapped to "Midisoft.Mediaplayer" ... and, of course, there is no entry by that name in the list, so I can't find anything to unmap!
301) When IE locks up trying to get to an FTP site, you can't even unlock it by hitting the stop button or anything. What complete crap.
300) Having everything be the browser and the browser be everything sucks because there is no partitioning of preferences. E.g.: if I want a new codec for the Windows Media Player, I have to set all my IE security options. I can't just set the Media Player security options. Suck!
299) I'm so glad that when you are importing Favorites into IE, it doesn't let you create a folder when it asks you where to put them. It presents you with a list of your Favorites folders, but you can't make a new one to put the stuff in. Expletive brilliance.
298) File dialogs don't remember anything properly. Like, if you switch to details mode, they forget that. If you move the columns around in details mode, they forget that. Yadda yadda yadda.
297) I can't figure out how to turn down stuff like beeping and IEs clicking, yet keep the cd music volume up. The whole volume control panel sucks; I'm pretty sure most everybody has to use trial and error to get anything set the way they want... if it can even be done at all.
296) The dos command 'find' spits out the names of every file it looks at, not just the ones that have actual matches in them. What a nightmare.
295) Why in the hell can't I drag an HTML file from it's listing in the File Explorer onto that same Explorer title bar to have it open the file in itself? It will only ever open the file in a new window.
294) Uh, the stupid globe has stopped spinning, yet IE hasn't rendered the page yet? Five seconds go by... eventually it renders. WTF? Why isn't the globe spinning the whole time? Like, until the final 'Done' message in the status bar?
293) Okay. So any time I remove or move a card in my PC, it seems like I have to end up reinstalling Win98. Like, I get some blue screen of death with a note about some vxd being all screwy when I try to boot. Nice.
292) In Win98, apparently when you click on the view button in an Open File dialog, it will cycle through the different modes. This doesn't happen on Win2k. You have to explicitly choose from a pop-up menu.
291) Is it me, or is there like no easy way to view PostScript files on Windows? You have to download all sorts of funky stuff. Sheesh.
290) In Outlook, you can search through your messages for something. When it gives you the results, it doesn't have a way to show you their position in your mail folder view. Instead, they appear in the results part of the search dialog. So, if you are looking for a message and the messages right around it this doesn't really help.
289) Every day, I come across another obscure annoying thing in IE. Today, it's all about tooltips: I click to have focus in the address field. I then for some reason (like, by an accidental nudge) end up with the mouse cursor over the back button. But I'm going to type an address in, still. So the tooltip for the back button shows up, obscuring the address field that I am trying to type into! The tooltip doesn't go away when I start typing.
288) Okay. So, at least in Word, you can have a menu appear above its entry in the menu bar, rather than below. This happens when the menu bar is too close to the bottom of the screen (sort of like how submenus in a hierarchy will draw to the left if they can't fit to the right). This sucks. First off, people expect entries in a menu to maintain a distance from the menu title. So, when I click on the File menu, I expect the New command to be right next to it. However, when the menu is drawn above, it is now the farthest item! The second issue is that the implementation will let you scroll the menu if it is too large to fit on the screen. (I would give you a screen shot, however, with my current keyboard I have to hit the Alt key to get to the Print Screen command, and hitting Alt makes the menu I'm trying to show you go away!) So then, given that putting the menu above rather than below is stupid, why didn't they just leave it below and chop it off with the ability to scroll down to the remaining commands?
287) Outline mode in Word is totally retarded, e.g.: you can't italicize things.
286) So you can enlarge the window control icons (minimize, maximize, close) and stuff in the Display Control Panel. What I would rather have is just being able to put space between them so I don't hit the wrong one by accident so much.
285) Maybe I've said it before, but I'll say it again: there is no Copy Shortcut when you are in ftp mode in IE. Suck ass.
284) Okay. I've got an issue with the Display Control Panel. When you are looking at the parameters for the monitor, you can pick a refresh rate. They have this selection that is called optimal. Note, they do not call it maximum. My sense of the term 'optimal' is in line with this dictionary definition: " most desirable possible under a restriction expressed or implied." The point being that the term makes me think there is some kind of trade-off being made; that you can't just pick the maximum because there are other considerations to, well, consider. Now, when it comes to the refresh rate of my monitor, I don't see that there are any trade-offs to make against having it at the maximum refresh rate it and the video card can to. I want everything maxed out. I don't want any compromise. And, I don't think anybody ever would. So, I think a term like maximum should be used instead.
283) In the Open File dialog, it can start off with a file name in there that is hilighted in blue. If you pick a different drive to be looking at, that too is hilighted in blue. So now which one has the keyboard focus comma you bastards?
282) IE is just progressively losing its mind. Now, if I have two error pages in a row and use the Back button, it doesn't actually go up back through my history. Instead, it gets stuck flipping between the two error pages. What the hell? This is on multiple sites.
281) Okay. If the focus is on the Address field in IE, and you hit tab, you get the focus on like the first link in the visible portion of the page. Fine. If you hit shift-tab to get back to the Address field, however, the page scrolls up and you get the previous link in the page (if there are any). You don't get back to the Address field. Pistol whipping will commence immediately.
280) The way people count bytes to get kilo and mega bugs me. Hard drives are measured by different people in different ways. Presumably, file sizes could also be calculated in different ways. It seems that Win2k even counts them in different ways! It is internally inconsistent! I have a file that says it is 5,164 KB in the File Explorer. Then, if I right-click and get properties on it, I see that the 'Size' and the 'Size on disk' are equal to one another, but completely different from the value reported in the Explorer. Two values are shown for each: 5.04 MB (5,287,326 bytes). Maybe I'm supposed to do the conversion to 1024 chunks to get KB on my own, but that seems stupid - your average user shouldn't have to do math to see that things are right. Sheesh.
279) Is it me, or can you not get IE to stop making the dumb ass annoying hateful hate hate hate clicking noise every time you click? God hell.
278) Every week, an MS product I'm using has to lose its mind. This week, IE has started to see my Ctrl-F as Ctrl-E. Gah. Who knows, maybe it is getting screwy 'cause of the keyboard remapper (good thing even Win2k doesn't support keyboard remapping and I have to get some hacked 3rd party thing) I'm using? Though, I've been using that for a long time and only have had the Ctrl-F problem very recently! IE bit rot.
277) Weird. On my Win98 machine at home, the My Documents folder doesn't have a Find... command in the right-click menu. Other folders do. What the hell? God, I hate Windows.
276) The suck-ass Windows Media Player doesn't let you Save the file (that you got through a web link, not off your disk). Utterly brilliant.
275) If you have several links going to a page, each with different anchors, IE still shows them all as visited. Sometimes, I really wish there was an option to say show only the anchors I've visited.
274) I'm so glad the Insert/Symbol dialog in Word has Arabic symbols, but no subset symbol.
273) Okay, I hate the stupid Microsoft compiled html help format. I also hate the help viewer. It gives you a back button, but it doesn't give you a forward button. It also doesn't appear to change the color of links after you have visited them.
272) It pisses me off that IE first puts up a dialog saying that it is getting file information, and only then lets me decide where to put it. It already knows the name of the thing being downloaded from the url. For a slow site, it is interrupting my work flow by not just letting me specify where it goes up front.
271) IE doesn't recall where the last File Download progress dialog was placed. So if you are downloading a bunch of things at once, you have to move each and every one out of your way. It is especially annoyingly dumb ass lame under Win2k with multiple displays.
270) In Word, you can make something be bulleted. The bullets can be indented like an outline. There is a toolbar for doing operations on the bulleted outline, like expanding everything down to a certain level, but that toolbar doesn't exist in the regular view! As far as I can tell, it only exists when you explicitly go into the outline document view... which completely doesn't understand the bulleting and indentation - it throws it all away! Modal crap!
269) I'm really sick and tired of being forced to have sans serif fonts everywhere. Sure, you can set some of the fonts for your system via the Display Properties control panel, but just about any and all text inside windows is a huge pain in the ass to change, system wide.
268) Okay, I hate everyone. I'm trying to use the com.ms.xml stuff, but not in MS Visual Java. So I'd like to know where the MS Java SDK installer put the damned libraries so I can point Cafe at them. You know, so I could actually use the damned things. Of course, it doesn't seem to install anything like mssdk.jar in the directory it says it installed everything into. Searching the Windows directory doesn't turn up any obviously correct hits, either. Did the classes actually even get installed? I have no way of knowing. There is some horrible msjava.lib file which might be what I want, but of course it is in a format that isn't readily readable or usable by anything other than MS Visual Java. Here's what I've been able to find so far:
```
     C:\WINDOWS\JAVA\Packages>dir /w
     Volume in drive C has no label.

     Directory of C:\WINDOWS\JAVA\Packages

     [.]            [..]           0K7RPJ5F.ZIP   22EQUVZL.ZIP   2QFDVFHZ.ZIP   C0SN9373.ZIP   [Data]         FPBJXR5V.ZIP
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267) You can have tabbish views in, like, your File Explorer. The first thing that is annoying is that you can only select a file in the Name column; no other column is 'live'. (This is presumably because of issues with drag and drop, but it is still annoying at times.) The second thing is that only the entry in the Name column will hilight, rather than the entire line. So if you have a lot of columns, and a scrollbar to get to the ones off screen, it is really hard to keep track of which line you are looking at, since the only thing that has a hilight is now outside the visible area!
266) Searching for files still sucks. Like, it appears there is no way to save the results of a search. So if you maybe had to search your entire drive, you would have to do that again if you accidentally overwrote the search results!
265) In Outlook's Address Book, you can sort the list of entries by email address. You cannot, however, sort them by the domain of the email addresses, which I've wanted to do more often!
264) I may just not grok the UI, but I can't seem to get IE to list my history as just a list of URLs, with no folders, in some date order. Like, Netscape let me do that so if I accidentally closed a window, I can make a new one and quickly get my page back! Oh, wait, it's not "View / By Date" it's "View / By Order Visited Today." As if the order by which I visited them today would be different from listing them by date? What the difference really is, is weather the links are grouped into domain folders. Completely dumb-ass UI.
263) So I want to look at an XML document in IE, and it tells me that it can't render that because the XSL is bogus. So then I figure I'll view the source 'cause that is what I'm interested in, in the first place. It says it can't show me any source.
262) You'd think that if you specify Tools / Internet Options / Accessibility / Ignore colors specified on web pages in IE, you wouldn't get any background images. Well, I'd expect that, anyway. I mean, if the point is to make the page more accessible then having the page colors ignored is going to be pretty pointless when dumb ass background images are let through. So, most of the time it works but sometimes (usually after I've fiddled with the settings a bit) it doesn't get rid of the images. Ugh. Spurious bugs are fun.
261) Ha ha, IE's address bar auto complete wants me to go to www.amazon.co.uk before www.amazon.com. Or www.ebay.co.uk before www.ebay.com. Whatever.
260) The dumb ass annoying auto complete stuff for IEs address field is horrible, as we well know. The latest thing that is killing me is it gives me completions when i'm typing www. Like, I type a w and it's already trying to give me stuff. Of course, the stuff it gives me is some utterly random url that's like from the depths of some online shopping place. It is obviously complete crap. As if this thing could possibly know what I'd want when I only typed www? Maybe if it was presenting an url I had just been to, but it doesn't even seem to be doing that. It's so utterly lame!
259) If you forward a message with a MIME encoded attachment, Outlook won't realize that the attachment is there. Instead, you just see the whole raw ASCII version of the message!
258) When you look at a document in outline form in Word, you see the bullets. They draw themselves as different icons for their level and if they are open or closed I guess. However, when you print the document out, those bullets go away. It makes it harder to figure out what level an item is at when there's no bullet! You are supposed to be able to guess by the amount of whitespace. That just doesn't work for an outline that's more than a page long!
257) Don't fool yourself into thinking Win2k can't freak out. I threw stuff away into the recycle bin and when I tried to empty it, actually deleting the files, it told me something weird like the source disk couldn't be found. Whatever the hell that meant. Rebooting let me delete the stuff fine.
256) When you are looking at your favorites in IE if you wait long enough it puts up a tooltip showing the full url, even if the title of the link is the url and the url fits on the line. Sure, I understand why that is so, under the covers, but it sure does look stupid. What it should do is just put the url in the status bar at the bottom of the window, with no delay, and not bother with the tooltip.
255) In Outlook, when you bring up the dialog for putting people into the To:, CC: and BCC: fields, you cannot drag and drop things. So if you have someone in the CC: field that you actually want in the BCC: field, you have to remove them then add them, rather than just dragging them over to the right place!
254) You can't tab into the column headings of things. Like the process list of the Task Manager. Or the Details columns of the File Explorer.
253) In Word, if you have part of a document that is in outline mode, there doesn't seem to be a way to extend that and maintain the depths. E.g.: if I want to add the title of that section into the outline, the depths of the already outlined part get flattened. It seems just plain cock-eyed wrong dumb broken.
252) My goodness I hate Word. Just trying to select a region of text that goes outside the current window is impossible. It scrolls at a million miles an hour. It makes me really quite mad. It also does this stupid thing where if I click and hold on a scroll arrow, after the page has been scrolling a bit it starts to speed up. There's no way to turn that off that I've seen. So if I want to skim through a document at a constant rate I have to keep letting go and then clicking all over again. It's an error in thinking that Microsoft makes all the time: they hyper optimize for some very single unique need, and thus screw up all the other iterations.
251) When you are importing favourites from Netscape or whatever into IE, it asks you where you want to place them in your favourites. It doesn't, however, give you any way to make a new folder. So you'd have to cancel out and make the folder via Organize Favorites and then go back through the import stuff again. I don't understand why there are like five different UIs all for viewing the 'Favorites' and it is killing me since the best and only one that should be used is the standard File Explorer. (Oh, and then I get a dialog box saying 'Error converting bookmarks' with absolutely no further explanation of what went wrong or what I could try to do to fix the problem!)
250) Roy notes that you can't edit the Address history, short of heading into the Registry. (The whole implementation of the Address history and Address auto complete kills me.)
249) I supposed if the Win2k folks really tried, they could make the Add/Remove Programs control panel start up more slowly. I mean, what the hell?
248) Paste via keyboard shortcut is screwy in my IE. Pretty much, the first time I hit Ctrl-V after clicking to set the focus to a text field, nothing happens. I have to hit it again for text to get pasted.
247) When you mouse over a link in IE, it puts the href url in the status bar. It doesn't do that when you are mousing over entries in your Back or Forward menus. It should.
246) This whole "IE is everything" thing is killing me, because it is so horribly modal. You can search through your web browsing history if you are in IE, but not if you are in the File Explorer. Whatever.
245) In IE, you can have stuff like the History or your Favorites in a window frame on the left, and see what they link to in the right hand frame. However, the left hand frame never has a horizontal scroll bar! So if you want to see the full text of the link, you have to resize that frame to potentially fill the majority of the window. I mean, don't these people know why scrollbars were invented in the first place?

>To heap on more insult and injury, when you mouse over a folder in the History, for example, it puts up a tooltip that merely has the name of the folder (even if the folder name doesn't extend past the edge of the frame) pre-pended with "Pages visited at" which then, if you open up the folder, is covering up the entries in the folder so you can't see them... As if I didn't know that the History contained pages I'd "visited at" before? And, of course, God only knows if you can turn of the tooltip. I certainly haven't found a way to do it. God, this stuff kills me.

244) The shortcuts in Win2k are retarded. The program you want to run has to be in quotes. The parameters passed to the program have to be, apparently, outside the quotes. Why the hell are there any quotes at all in the first damned place? Why the hell isn't there any explanation of why the hell there are the stupid ass quotes? (here's the steps I went through: i right clicked in a folder to make a new shortcut. it brought up the shortcut wizard. that let me pick a program, but not set any parameters. when i went into the properties of the shortcut, the program was in quotes. i tried to put the parameters inside the quotes. when i tried to hit okay or apply, it put up a dialog saying it was invalid. so eventually i just tried putting the parameters outside the quotation marks. then, it worked.)

243) When there are a bazillion things in an open subfolder in the File Explorer, it's hard to know which things are at the same level. You scroll down for a long time and don't know what is in what any more. It's just like the problem where you are writing long code, and you no longer can see the opening bracket that your closing one matches. We deserve better feedback about that stuff.

242) IE doesn't remember my text search options between searches; I turn on "Match whole word only" and then it's not on the next time. It should stay on until I turn it off. At most, it should reset to off if I completely exit IE.

241) Why is it that when I try to send myself a page via email in IE (e.g.: the result of an order I placed), I tend to get just a link and not the actual source or text that was on the page when I had it in the browser? And, no, I didn't pick "Send Link by Email." In at least one case, it looks like IE couldn't properly handle a refresh via meta tag; all I got in the email was the first page with the refresh, rather than the contents of the final page?!

240) When I print something out from IE, I can't find a way to turn off the URL at the bottom of the print out. Oh, wait, it's in the Page Setup dialog. You know, I've never really understood why people break all the printing stuff out into two dialogs like that. It seems like it's all related information that I'd want to get at from one place. Stupid Macintosh probably started the whole problem. IE's Page Setup dialog sucks in that the header and footers look like if you clear them, you can't get them back unless you've written them down or memorized them or something, and they use an utterly cryptic syntax. Terrific. Great. Super.

239) IE's address auto complete is such a complete tub of excrement that it decides when I type in "yahoo" I really mean "http://yahoo.cnet.com" rather than trying "www.yahoo.com" first.

238) The Windows Update download dialog doesn't show you what transmission rate you are getting. Also, you don't seem to ever get a chance to pick from a set of mirrors. Maybe there aren't any, or maybe it picks the best one automagically? It would be a lot more reassuring if I had some information presented to me that showed me I was getting a good connection.

237) Windows Update doesn't seem to cache things it downloads. It got DirectX 7.0a for me, then IE crashed before the install actually happened. When I go to download it again, it has to download the entire thing because the updater doesn't, apparently, attempt to do anything about interrupted downloads - like cache the stuff it already downloaded onto disk, while it is downloading. If I ever get the chance to slap someone silly for this, I promise I will. (I've heard that in some situations, some versions of IE will properly cache stuff to disk so you don't have to start all over again. Maybe I should just have upgraded IE first - not that anybody tells you that, that I've seen, on the Windows Update page. I mean, the download for IE 5.5 is the first thing listed, but it doesn't say anything about how it would make other downloads more robust.)

236) IE seems to really screw up text a lot these days. Maybe it's because I've told it to use my rendering options and not anything specified by the page - which is no excuse, it should be able to handle that properly just fine. Maybe it's style sheets, I don't know; in some trouble pages I see lots of #layers.

235) Sometimes web pages render less than ideally in IE: the text is wrapped okay, but it's right hand edge is just next to the scroll bar. There should actually be a few more pixels of space, so that the user can plainly see that there isn't anything cut off, without having to look at the scroll bar at the bottom of the window. It's just bad - haven't they ever heard of the concept of a margin? (It is probably all because of damned style sheets or something.)

234) Win2k's self-altering menus suck. The way they pick what to keep visible, and what to hide, isn't very clear. The way they sort things is unclear. Lastly, the thing which really bugs the heck outta me is that they use time as an indication that you are looking for a hidden item, rather than just giving you a menu entry that would let you get at the hidden items. So if you are, say, looking for a recent bookmark but it takes a while to figure out which one it is, just as you are about to click on it suddenly the menu changes right out from under you and now you are hopelessly lost. You have to close the menu and start all over again. It's completely retarded and I hate it. Furthermore, once one submenu has gone past the limit, all submenus are from then on fully expanded.

233) IE's search sucks. I'm searching for "science" and it always scrolls so that the matches are the last line of the page, even though the find dialog is outside the window. So I don't get to see all of the context for the match - could be "science fiction," could be "mystery science theatre," could be whatever. Furthermore, if you are loading a big page, you might do your search before the page is finished loading. Depending on the page, when it is done a horizontal scroll bar could suddenly appear, overwriting the last line on the page... which is the search hit you just got. D'oh!

232) Sometimes, IE has the globe spinning and when I hit stop, it just keeps on going.

231) When apps crash (e.g.: Visual Cafe, Mozilla, whatever), the system doesn't redraw the desktop where they were. I have to move windows around to get expose events generated. Seems like if windows go away, the system should generate expose events for the windows and desktop underneath?!

230) You cannot select more than one item at a time in the Organize Favorites dialog of IE. It is utterly retarded. It would clearly be so much better if the Organize command just opened up a File Explorer that was pointing at the Favorites folder on your hard drive. A herniated hyena could see that, it doesn't take rocket science.

229) IEs order of dialog boxes seems broken. I am on a secure form page that has a secure submission. Its result is to redirect me to a non-secure url. First, I get a dialog box saying that I'm submitting insecurely (which is just wrong, in and of itself since the form's method is an https url!), and then I get one saying I'm being redirected. Seems like, in the case that I still get the wrong insecurity dialog, I should see the redirect dialog first, since that is what is really the insecure item?!

228) I click to scroll a page down using the scroll bar in IE, but the space bar doesn't start working until I click in the frame (even when there are no frames).

227) The IE Options dialog box is so horribly disorganized... and this is in version 5 of a product. Come on.

226) Hierarchical menus exist in Windows. Why isn't the Control Panels entry in the Start Menu a link to a sub menu of all the different ones?

225) There is no rhyme or reason or rule about what happens when you click on a button in a window that doesn't have focus. In IE, you can click on the back button and it will do it, as well as bring the window up. In Word, you can click on the close file button and the window gets selected, but then nothing further happens. In Outlook, you have to click on the "New" button thrice before it will actually bring up the composition window for you! It's all such stinky crap! (Note: on my new machine, you only have to click twice. Dunno if my previous machine was just insane, or if Outlook changed. Both ran Win2k.)

224) The password screen saver doesn't seem to take the first key stroke as part of the password. Annoying.

223) If you change the view in the Windows Calculator accessory, data you just entered is lost.

222) The spelling check functionality of MS Word is pathetic. Either it's dictionary is woefully lacking, or its algorithms for determining when a word closely resembles another is simply ineffective. E.g.: it marks the spelling petulent as problematical, however, it does not indicate the correct petulant anywhere. If I didn't know how to spell it in the first place, why should you expect me to suddenly know it when you ask me? Am I really supposed to hold the program's hand and do all the dictionary look ups myself? This is considered a feature? Progress? For this, other major word processors have left the market? Since the program is making absolutely no suggestions, I assume the dictionary has not been installed. Of course, there is nothing to indicate that fact.

221) IE's ftp mode is, as I've noted before, really stupid. Some more goodies: when you right click on a file to download, rather than getting a Save As command, you get a Copy to Folder command that doesn't even use the standard Open File type dialog. It's a crappy hack. Also, when it starts and ends the download, it forces IEs window to the front, just to be that little bit extra annoying.

220) IE has the history in the Back button, and then it has the history in the Address bar. The Address bar history isn't quite right. It should take you back to the last place you were on the previous site. Instead, it seems to take you back to like the first place you were on the previous site. Like, it totally didn't remember the results of my hotbot search. Furthermore, with the Back / Forward history you can always go forward again (until you type something in and branch off), but you can't do that with the Address bar history. It's just not at all well thought out and executed; they've got like one fifth of the whole good idea.

219) Sometimes, the menus in IE lock up. You click on the title and nothing happens. If you go click on the menus in another IE window that gets things working fine again. Whatever.

218) If you have a menu open when IE loads a new page, the menu goes away, right out from under you.

217) Look. The shortest keyboard repeat startup delay is too damned long. Why the hell doesn't the slider go all the way down to like zero, anyway? Why should someone at MS decide what's good for me like that? Sheesh.

216) Why does the Printers folder only appear in the Start menu, and not in the File Explorer? Is it me, or is there no way to just print a damned PostScript file directly? Do you have to go through some 3rd party application? What the hell?

215) Outlook sucks because it doesn't, as far as I can tell, have a full set of text editing features. Like, how to I upcase or downcase a region? Doesn't it make sense that if I'm working on text I should have features that help me actually edit text? Doesn't Microsoft make a word processor? Couldn't they maybe have included it's relevant features in Outlook? Hello?

214) There is no consistency about how Tab and Shift-Tab select the next field. That is, if you Shift-Tab to a previous text field, some things will just put the cursor at the end of it (which is the good behaviour, in case I need to spell it out for anybody), while other things will select the whole shebang, making it that much harder to just append the character you missed as you were typing too fast and hit Tab too early. On the other hand, when I'm tabbing forward, it doesn't always select the whole thing (at least for some password fields I've encountered) and I wish it did.

213) The scrollbars in Outlook's message composition window are doofy. If I'm composing a reply (to a reply to a reply), I tend to remove the extraneous text. So I select that stuff, and hit delete. I end up with a blank screen (the remaining text is above, not visible) and a scroll bar that says I'm looking at like 99.9% of the whole document. That is, all I see is emptiness, and the scroll bar thumb thingy is taking up almost all of the scroll bar area. Which is ass backward, since really there's not even blank lines on the screen, so the majority of the document is really the text that's above, not all this empty (off the end of the document) space. Why it doesn't redraw things properly I do not know. What is even more screwy is that if I click on the scroll thumb thingy, I don't even have to move it, if I just click on it once, the display redraws to show all the text rather than the blankness!

212) Some additions from a reader (I assume he wishes to remain anonymous?):

If I hit the "Windows" key, the Start Menu takes my focus. I can hit Escape to make the Start Menu go away, but why doesn't the focus return to the app I was working on? [Editor's Note: it actually does work correctly on Win 2k... but it doesn't seem to be working under XP right now. Uh, yay!]
It's bad enough when an app steals the focus just because I started it, but when it steals the focus to put up a splash screen, and then I take the focus back, and then it steals it again to put up the actual app window, well that just plain sucks.
What's with these items on toolbars that don't have a corresponding menu entry? Menus I can access via the keyboard (not always easily, but it can be done). If it's on the toolbar there better be a corresponding menu entry. Also, dinky toolbar icons do not communicate information clearly - if I have to wait for a tooltip to know what the icon does then it would be faster for me to go to a menu.

211) Outlook says "Mail Delivery Complete" even when, I think, there was no mail in my Outbox. That's annoying because then I'm wondering if maybe there was mail that shouldn't have been there, like, it failed to send stuff the previous time but didn't tell me or something. If there's no mail to deliver, then don't make it seem like there was. Sheesh.

210) In Word, "Page Down" is really just "Half a Page Down," and that is pissing me off. A lot.

209) If you use IE's Accessibility options, and you are on a page that does JavaScript mouse-over pop-up menus, you get text overlaid on the page text with no clearing of the menu's background. So, rather than filling the menu background with white, it just doesn't do the clearing at all.

208) Quite often, I click on a menu and nothing happens for a couple of entire seconds; the Insert menu in Outlooks' message composition window; the View / Explorer Bar menu in IE; yadda yadda yadda. So it's not restricted to just one app, it's something stupid in potentially any app.

207) If I log out then log back in, when I click on a file with no mapping to an application, the system chugs for a good five seconds before putting up the "Open With" dialog. But I haven't even installed or removed any software. And why doesn't it just have a pre-built list that gets updated by the "Add/Remove Programs" so it could just show up pretty much immediately?

206) Is it me, or does the Command Prompt still not let you log to a file? Combine that with it's crappy copy and paste...

205) So I wanted to change the permissions on the ftproot. I right-clicked on it in the File Explorer and chose the Properties command. That dialog had stuff for "Sharing" and "Web Sharing" so I was fiddling with the "Web Sharing" stuff to enable write permissions. Didn't work. Ended up that I had to use the Internet Services Manager control panel. Seems confusing to me - another one of those cases where it's really not at all clearly defined via the UI what is what, and why.

204) Sharing Violation is not a sufficient error message. Tell me what app has the resource locked.

203) If the recycle bin has a lot of stuff in it, and you empty it, it takes a long time, and that blocks you from using icons on the desktop, I guess sort of like you can't use the File Explorer when it's copying or deleting or whatever.

202) The "copy" functionality of the Command Prompt is so obviously wrong. No other app works that way (unless you hold down Alt).

201) The Open file dialog box doesn't give you any way to copy out it's current location, which would be useful if it is the only thing in the obscure directory you want.

200) The Notepad can't handle LF vs. CR. It's all ugly and broken and wrong and useless and stupid.

199) Sometimes, you just want IE to show the damned file, and not launch some stupid helper to display it. Furthermore, there doesn't seem to be a place in IE's Options to futz with file viewer mappings. I'm assuming it just uses the Windows mappings, which bugs me. This whole "everything-is-IE, and IE is joined at the hip with the OS" is very frustrating at times. So, like, I just want to look at a Java file and it brings up the suck-ass Notepad which can't handle carriage returns vs. line feeds. Or I want to look at a .bmp and it brings up the Paint util, rather than just showing it so I could then use the "File/Send/Page by Email" command.

198) At least in some apps (e.g.: VisualCafe) you cannot resize the Open file dialog box. That is insane. I've got this huge screen and I can't even resize the stupid thing. What I want is to be able to resize it, and then have the damned thing remember that size.

197) Oh my god. If you are in the Details listing in the Open file dialog, and you change the sort order, and then move up and down the hierarchy, it doesn't remember the sort order. It reverts whenever you switch directories. It certainly doesn't remember after you close it, either.

196) For some inexplicable reason, the File Explorer's Search is screwing up case sensitivity - when I search for "HierarchyUtil*" it fails, but if I search for "*util*" it shows me "hierarchyutil.java" even though the File Explorer shows "HierarchyUtil.java"! (yeah, I know the exclamation point should go inside the quotes, but that's just ugly.)

195) A friend comments:

"So who the hell thought it would be such a great idea for the icons in Internet Explorer to be grey until you move your mouse over them? Like I can tell the difference between that and the disabled buttons."
Even though you can alter the colors for windows, change font sizes, etc. in the Display Properties, lots of things ignore them so that your display ends up being unreadable. So it's a pretty narrowly useful (read: basically useless) feature.

194) The Word Find and Replace dialog hides the ability to search up or down amazingly well. Presumably because nobody ever wants to do that, so they wouldn't be looking for it, ha ha.

193) Frames in windows applications seem to be broken more often than not. Most of the time in IE I can't get a resize mouse cursor. In Perforce, I can get it when I approach the frame border from one side, but not if I approach from the other?! How hard can this be, people? (I've just recently noticed that even though the resize cursor doesn't appear in IE, I can still sometimes click on the frame border and move it. Weird.)

192) The implementation of the "Explorer is everything" drives me nuts. I want my control panels to always be listed alphabetically, but more often I want the files to be listed in order of modification date. But it doesn't seem to try and remember that these are different views, so when I change one, the other also gets altered. Bad.

191) So Win2k has "Desktop Themes" which are annoying, but also it looks to me that their "Windows 98" theme is wrong. Since when has Win98 used italicized window titles? Whatever. ... Oh my god. "Rotate theme monthly." Oh. My. God. I'm completely on the wrong damned planet.

190) Oh, yeah, and sometimes when I'm composing mail or news in Outlook or Outlook Express, when I get to the last visible line and hit return, the cursor merrily goes off the bottom and doesn't scroll everything up, so now I cannot see what I'm typing.

189) The MSIE Accessibility options don't work 100%. You can have pages (click on a color) which set colors and so end up being partially or fully blank because IE has decided to let some color specs through, and not others, so you get white text on a white background. Now that's what I call useful!

188) Windows does this thing where a menu command will have a keyboard shortcut, and it's sometimes shown as an underlined letter in the word. E.g.: the 'D' in 'Delete'. Furthermore, it looks like the font used for the menu items is proportional. So if the shortcut key letter is 'l', you only get this wee itty bitty underline, since the letter is only one pixel wide. So it's hard to see which letter is the one you want. So, I'm going to suggest that it would be better to make the important letter be shown in bold (and maybe still also underlined).

187) Oh my god. Oh. My. God. The Microsoft Outlook Newsreader (which is really just Outlook Express, apparently) is modal. When you are composing a new post, you cannot use the main window. That's right, you cannot view any other messages. You cannot get at their contents for review or inclusion in your new message. You. Cannot. Use. The. Main. Window. What bastard planet are these people from? Not to mention things like how it doesn't remember what you had expanded in a newsgroup, so when you go back to it (like you were just really briefly checking some other group) you have to re-expand the thread you were reading, and then you hit the problem that the expansion toggle box is too small and sometimes hard to hit. I hate everybody. Oh, yeah, and then there's this other nifty twitch where when you close the composition window, Outlook is no longer the top application, instead like the next one down (or something) comes to the front?! So then, of course, since I'm using Win2k, the bloody Task Bar entry for the main window starts flashing just to add insult to injury. It's just such an obviously huge piece of excrement. Here's a clue: if you add a feature that might reasonably be considered by someone, somewhere, to suck ass, then have a way for them to turn it off.

186) Outlook has a Send/Receive button. Even if you only want to just send mail, and aren't worried about receiving right then, you still have to type in your password. There should be a Send and then a separate Send/Receive button, I think (the Outlook Newsreader sort of has the feature... of course, that's a completely separate program (it's really just Outlook Express I guess)). There are plenty of issues with the way the current password system works:

If you have multiple accounts, it doesn't ask you for all the passwords up front. Instead, it asks you after it's contacted each server. Which means you are constantly interrupted. Sure, you can let it remember your passwords for you, but I really hate that whole idea because then I tend to forget my passwords. I'm pretty sure that lots of people get screwed sooner or later by using that crutch.
The dialog defaults to having your user name selected, rather than having the text caret in the password field. Since you are using accounts which you have already set up and which contain your user name, you are pretty much never going to change it. So it's utterly retarded to have that field selected; it only slows you down and also gives you the chance of typing something before hitting tab, screwing everything up even more. (Note that it's really likely that will happen because of the first point - you try and go do something else while the first server is being contacted, and then suddenly Outlook throws up the next dialog, and your typing, which you expected to be for the other app you were in, suddenly blows out your user id.
If you have multiple monitors in Win2k, Outlook doesn't seem to check where it is, and always puts the dialog up on the primary display. So you can't even just get it out of your way for a while. Well, even if you could I guess it would still be stealing focus when it brought up the dialog. Argh!
If you use IE to do "Send page by e-mail..." it doesn't tell you that it only entered the message into your outbox, and did not actually send it!

185) Seems like there is no consistency about how file exploring displays and sorts in the File Explorer vs. Open File dialogs. It kills me.

184) In Outlook, you can do the "Detect and Repair." Since my Outlook has been screwy for a long time now (it always says that there was an error, (good thing you can't copy out the error messages), even though that's not true: "The operation was canceled. (Account 'x', POP3 Server: 'x', Error Number: 0x800ccc17)") so I decided to give it a try. It brings up a dialog box that includes a checkbox labeled "Restore my shortcuts while repairing." Of course, I don't know what the hell that actually does and there's no help link right there. I'm about to launch something that will explicitly screw around with my mail reader system, so I'm already very wary, worried that it will just end up destroying email (like Netscape seems to do to everyone, sooner or later), and there's this obscure option that might do something useful, but it might do something entirely evil and there's no explanation. This is insanity! (It's checked by default, so I guess I'll go with that?) So of course it turns out that to do the repair it needs the MS Office CD-ROM. Does it tell you that up front? No!

183) Sometimes, the auto complete "feature" of the IE address bar doesn't do anything. It's turned on, but a known url, for which it has put up completions before, doesn't get any activity from it. Whatever.

182) I'm so glad that Windows 2000 doesn't have a real proportional scrollbar for it's Command Prompt. I mean, it's not as if that idea has been around for like more than a decade, or anything.

181) I think you should be able to right-click in any text field and get Cut/Copy/Paste options. For some reason, the Find and Replace dialog in Word doesn't give you that functionality.

180) IE is used everywhere. So if you set your accessibility options to ignore colors etc., when you go to your Add/Remove Programs control panel, it too has been altered! That is just plain obviously wrong, since IE doesn't provide any way to say "only do it to web pages."

179) When it comes to uninstalling, shared files are handled extremely poorly. It should show them all together with check boxes next to them so you can do it all at once, rather than one at a time. Currently, you can get situations where the first 3 questions are obviously files that only the program used, then like 2 from the actual windows folder, then another 3 from the application folder. It's so stupid and dangerous.

178) Browser's security notices don't appear well when in frames. Like, you can have a secure form in a frame but there's nothing on the screen telling you it's secure!

177) Browsers should populate back button with history so you aren't so frustrated when it crashes and you have to restart, and you want to get back to where you just were when it wedged. (The actual relationship between the Address bar history and the Back button history is still obscure to me.)

176) Having web links in your Word document just means you're more likely to get annoyed during editing when you try trying to select the link text to copy or change it, and instead you end up going to the destination url. Oh, wait, you can apparently turn it off in the "AutoFormat As You Type" options. Which leads me to say that these days A) I really wish all the options were off by default and B) The Help needs to have spectacular coverage of options, with lots of synonyms.

175) When you are typing an URL into IE, it shows you an entry for possible completion. It can also show you other entries. I think that if you just hit enter, the entry in the address field is used, but if you hit tab, it picks the top entry of the list. Whatever, it just all seems wrong to me. I want it to not put anything in the bar, and show everything in the list, and to only do completion if I explicitly hit tab. Grr. I'm a tcsh freak.

174) There's some new "feature" where you can hide windows by clicking on their Task Bar entry. That's really stupid and annoying since I want clicking on the Task Bar entry to just always bring that window to the front, because I'm trying to find the damned window. Now, it gets all screwy and confusing with windows hiding when I really don't want them to. It's especially a problem when I have two applications that look very similar (e.g.: Visual C++ and Visual Cafe), and so I'm clicking on the Task Bar entry to make sure I've got the right one -- it's the quickest and easiest way to do that, except that it no longer works because if the app I wanted was really on top, all of a sudden it disappears which is exactly the opposite and wrong functionality!

173) Seems like there's no standard for how the "Window" menu in applications is supposed to work. In some, when you pick one of the windows (say, number 7 of 9) that window comes to the front and that's it. In Visual C++, however, the window you chose now becomes window 1 and the other windows are reordered. I think in still others, they don't rearrange the entries in the menu, but some list the windows alphabetically while others list them in the order you opened them? It all just seems really screwy.

172) Why can't I save my Security settings as a new set, so I can easily go back to them (rather than having to laboriously go through each item and set it's value)? Because MS wants to make it as annoying as possible for me to keep my own choices, so I will tend to use theirs instead? "Always trust content from Microsoft Corporation," my mangy ass.

171) For hierarchical menus, when I click on the first level, I want it to lock the second level in place because it's hard to get the mouse over to the second level sometimes without leaving the area and causing the menu to go away. Hello? Why does that work only sometimes, in some applications? Because Windows developers are idiots? Okay, I can buy that.

170) Outlook does this utterly screwy thing where you click on the 'New' button (to start composing a new letter) and the button hi-lights... but nothing happens. You have to click it again. Also, how the heck do I actually really see all the headers (like, the routing for the message)? Also, the whole address book system is crap! Like, what is the point of the naming when it doesn't even use the names I give it? E.g.: I have one address for my friend 'fred smith', called 'fred', and I have another address that's for a mailing list that fred is on, 'list@tomandfred.org' and I've called that 'tnf', and when I compose mail to 'fred' Outlook says that it's an ambiguous name and asks me to choose between the thing I've named 'fred' and the thing I've named 'tnf'. So what is the point of having the naming when it doesn't even do anything useful?

169) So now entries in the Task Bar flash for random reasons. I hate it. A lot. It would be fine if it only flashed when something important was going unnoticed, but it seems like it's done unnecessarily. For example, when IE starts, if it isn't the front window it flashes like crazy, even though all it's doing is loading a page. Sheesh. And then it locks it's Task Bar entry into reverse video mode until you bring it to the front! How utterly stupid and obnoxious!

168) I want to be able to right-click on any image in a web page and get it's URL rather than having to laboriously find it in the source. I mean, come on!

167) Oh. My. Expletive. God. If you have a url in IEs address bar, and you have auto completion on, and you select the end of the url and delete it and hit return, the ending has been put right back on.

166) Sometimes, IE's address field completion works. Other times, I type in something which has previously brought up a match, but instead does absolutely nothing as if the history has been blown out, even though it hasn't. It is interesting to see how staggeringly frustrating it is when a system worked one way, and you got used to it so you could type quickly with your finger motor memory, then suddenly or spuriously stops working that way. Baseball bat frustrating.

165) I upgraded from pre to final release Win2k, and now even though I have all of the sounds turned off, my computer still beeps when I hit ^G in terminal programs (I use SecureCRT and Tera Term). Hey, wait, it also beeps when a dialog box comes up in IE, even though I have sound levels at zero and muting on. It didn't do this with my pre-release setup! I really want to inflict pain over this. (Update: it no longer does it, but I really don't know what I did, if anything, to make it stop.)

164) Is it me, or can you still not open an enclosing folder for hits in file explorer Search Results? Oh, wait, you have to right click on the file - you can't just bloody well double click on the folder that's listed. Hate.

163) I upgraded from a pre release to a final release version of Win2k, and now the Undo entry in the right-click menu of IE's address bar is drawn all screwy. No other Undo entry in other IE menus is screwed up, just that one.

162) Look. If you are going to make the web browser also be the file explorer, etc., then you have to worry about it becoming stupidly modal. Which IE has. For example, if I go to an FTP site via a hypertext link, I no longer have the New Window command in the File menu. Instead, I only have New Folder.

161) IE has the Address auto complete feature. It must have been written by a couple of crack monkeys. Dead crack monkeys. For example, if I type in "daily" it shows me a link to a Yahoo daily news article I looked at maybe like a month ago now, rather than the more likely "dailyradar" site I look at maybe once a day. Maybe they figured that it should go for longer urls first? But no, because there are situations where it picks the shorter one. So I guess they explicitly chose to bring up the oldest one? Or maybe it has advanced AI that determines what the worst choice would be, and puts that up. (Sometimes, it looks like it is doing things in some sort of alphabetical order. That's super genius, too.)

160) Win 98 Scan Disk has a completion bar that tends to go up to like 95% and then jump back to 85% and then work it's way back up again. Whatever.

159) How do you turn off link tool tips in IE 5?

158) If you have multiple IE windows up, and one of the ones in the background puts up a dialog box, your front window which is obscuring the dialog etc. will be all cockamamie: you can hit forward and back, but you can't get any menus!

157) Is it me, or is there no way to get a history of errors (like mail delivery ones) in Outlook?

156) Is it me, or does Outlook's message composition window not have Search/Replace functionality?!

155) In Outlook, you can select the mail delivery errors, but if you right click, nothing happens. If you can copy something via a keyboard short cut, it should have a right-click menu which includes the copy command. Of course, in this case, you can't even use Ctrl-C to copy. Whatever. As if maybe being able to pass error messages along to system administrators isn't obviously desirable.

154) The network control panel can come up really slowly. So you double click on, like, Local Area Connection, and if, say, your network cable is unplugged somewhere, it takes what seems like a good 15 seconds for the control panel to appear. The machine is running, you can move the mouse cursor and select stuff, it's only the control panel that is slow. Since nothing seems to have happened, you then double click on LAC again but now you get a message telling you that the control panel won't be launched because it is already open. Even though, from the user's perspective, it sure as heck isn't.

153) If you have IE in file browser mode, when you double click on an html file it gets opened in a new window. If you don't want that, you are in something of a bad situation because you cannot drag and drop the filename into the address bar (to have it open in the same window). So you have to type the name into the address bar. What. Ever.

152) IE's address bar has a little history you can use to get back to previous URLs. When you pick the entry you want, it doesn't always immediately close the little pop-up and go to that url. Rather, there can be a good second where the window is still there, and as you move the mouse the selection hi-light even moves! So it totally looks like your click didn't work. I really don't understand why that happens. It's not like I'm running on a sluggard machine (pIII 500), and in my test case I'm even picking a file:// URL which doesn't have to hit the net or anything! It's just nuts.

151) It seems like every version of IE puts the Options menu entry under a different menu. Was it really that hard to get it right the first time? Same thing with Security vs. Advanced options (e.g.: cookies).

150) Outlook doesn't update the window you are scrolling. So you can't easily scan through your Inbox or Read stuff. Whatever.

149) Why must IE put up a dialog box telling me that an Active X control won't be run? I've turned them off on purpose. I guess it's just that MS figures if they are annoying, I'll cave in and turn the stupid Active X stuff back on.

148) The Notepad totally screws up redraws when it's been under another application window.

147) The selection goes away when a window loses focus. Sometimes, I use the selection hi-light to mark a region and I want to keep that marking when I switch to another window. I think the selection should still be visible in unfocused windows, just more grayed so you know it's not available for copying into the buffer. (Update: oh, wait, even better, it depends on the application! IE has it go away, but the Notepad doesn't. Yeeehaw, every man for himself!

146) So there's the stupid new "feature" for searching a database of names if the address you type into IE isn't found. It's annoying because there's no option to turn it off, so i can get back to just typing in foo and having www.foo.com appear. Also, when you are typing stuff into the address bar, if the site doesn't look like a real site then the word "Search" is pre-pended to what you are entering into the Address field. It's screwed up, though, so that if you type more and hit tab again, another "Search" is added so you end up with (I copy and pasted this directly from my IE session!) stuff like: "Search Search Search slashdot.org"

145) It seems that Outlook is pretty stupid when it comes to looking in folders: I open up my Read folder and it doesn't prefetch anything even though it's all stored locally! I have to scroll down and it pauses while it's loading stuff. If I don't scroll down, then when I click on column headings to change the sort order, only the files already visible in the list appear. I have to manually force it to load everything first!

144) So IE does the thing where you can use the space bar to scroll down a page. However, no other scrolling list in IE, or anywhere else in Windows, does that which is a shame.

143) The first time I go to the View / Explorer Bar menu in an IE session, it takes about 5 seconds before the menu finally appears.

142) The Add to Favorites dialog box lists the folders in alphabetical order. So my "Word Ref" folder is the last one, off the bottom of the scrollable area. So I constantly have to scroll down to get at it. You cannot resize the dialog box (let alone would it remember that size, probably). Why didn't they implement their (annoying since you cannot turn it off, ever, as far as I've seen) "show only the most recent folders" stuff in the Add to dialog as well? Of course, the Organize Favorites dialog lists them in some apparently utterly random order. Microsoft's motto must be something like, "Consistent UI is the last refuge of the weak and insecure." And remember, I'm talking about version 5 of this thing. You'd think they'd have had enough time to get these things worked out properly. The Favorites are just folders on disk, so why isn't it just using the File Explorer interface fer cryin' out loud? Oh, and when I open up the Organize Favorites dialog, it takes it quite often redraws itself after a second, so I'm trying to scroll down to a folder and then the view jumps back up to the top when the redraw happens. Also, when I'm adding a favorite and creating a new sub folder, I have to open the parent folder and I use the '+' rather than double-clicking. That means the parent folder isn't actually selected, so when I go and do New Folder, it puts it in the wrong bloody place. I want the act of opening a parent folder to select it, obviously! Note that the interface for Adding is totally different than for Organizing (and they both suck, if only because of that fact): when Organizing, just clicking on a folder once, not even double clicking, opens it up. And, when you are looking for something, the display doesn't show all the folders at the top. Instead it's all in some random crappy order that I hate. I absolutely detest Microsoft products.

141) The Organize Favorites dialog box is a total piece of junk. For example, when you cut a folder out from inside another folder, if all you have are top level folders then you can't paste it into the top level because anywhere you click selects a folder. So the paste puts it in as a sub folder of that selected one. It's nuts.

140) So when you pick a file that Windows doesn't have any application registered for that extension, why isn't the Notepad the first thing in the list of applications it gives you to choose from? Of course, Notepad is really annoying in that it always appends .txt, even if you type in a file name with another extension. You have to explicitly change the file type. Whatever.

139) Why is there a Cancel button in IE's Find dialog? It doesn't do anything special.

138) It isn't clear in MSIE when frames are adjustable or not. You can mouse-over their edges in the hopes that the cursor will change to let you know, but ever since using Visual Studio, with all it's bugs about mouse-over cursor changes, I've been really skeptical of trusting that behaviour. An, in fact, it is utterly broken in IE on my machine. My suggestion (besides "fix it so it at least actually works all the time, for starters, you idiots"): I'd like the frame borders to be grayed out a little bit if they are defined to be fixed. What the bloody thing should of course obviously do is give me the option of forcing all frames to always be user adjustable. Remember, folks, the whole point of the web in the first place was to let the user determine the look and feel.

137) These days, the File Explorer and Internet Explorer are the same thing, right? So why is it so modal and crappy? If I'm looking at files, Open creates a new window. If I'm doing web stuff, it doesn't.

136) In IE's Security section, there's the pop-up menu to choose a default security level (Low, Medium, High). It bugs me that you have to hit the Reset button. I think it should just apply the change when you hit Ok (and put up the "are you sure" dialog then). I keep forgetting I have to hit the Reset button, probably because it's stupid.

135) The common installer progress thingy is insane: it has two bars which get more "full" as they go up, and one bar (how full the destination disk is) which gets more "full" as it goes down.

134) Would it really be that hard for IE to get an interrupt while you are typing in the Address bar, so it would know not to blow it out when it's done loading the page?

133) It bugs me that the Folders button is only available in IE when you are looking in the file system. I want it there when I'm looking at web pages so I can easily go into File Explorer mode.

132) The wild-cards in Word's find/replace seem really screwy to me. I tell it to look for " @" which means "one or more spaces." Instead of being greedy and finding the biggest chunk of whitespace it can, it just finds them one at a time. So " " isn't considered one match, but three.

131) Netscape Communicator tells you if you are trying to download a file that is too big for your disk. IE seems to just merrily download it and then tell you it failed to write it. You can't just go get the temp version IE downloaded very easily, either.

130) There are so many buttons in IE I would turn off permanently, if I could. A perfect example is the Edit button which fires up Word.

129) The spell check doesn't learn the plural (behaviours) when I add the singular (behaviour).

128) The spell check interface is insane. If that dialog looses focus, you have to hit resume. Why isn't clicking on it to give it focus back enough?!

127) Why is it that everything Word flags during spell check has no correction suggestion? My first guess would be that some dictionary wasn't installed somewhere, which only leads me to rant about lame installation scripts and sanity checking.

126) I've seen a few programs have flashing thumb scroll widgets in their scroll bars, and they didn't seem to serve any real purpose. Clicking on them didn't stop it, moving the scroll bar around didn't stop it... is this some "feature" of windows, or is it that people actually built new code to do something that stupid?

125) Another beauty just takes the cake: I'm trying to put a diagram into Word, so I pick "Insert/Picture/" then take a random stab at "New Drawing" and I get an error dialog that is utterly devoid of useful information: "The server application, source file, or item cannot be found. Make sure the application is properly installed, and that it has not been deleted, moved, or renamed." Uh, how about telling me what application, source file, or item I should be fixing?

124) I drew a diagram in Word. It automatically put me in the Page Layout Mode when I started drawing it. When I go back to Normal Mode, the diagram is invisible.

123) Word doesn't seem to have a Status Bar option in the View menu. (I'm just trying to get the darned thing to show me what page number I'm on!) I thought the status bar was like a super standard Windows thing?

122) Word doesn't let me have it put all of the auto save files into some directory, so they'd be out of my way until I really needed them.

121) The toolbar lists windows in order of creation. I'd rather have them listed in the same horizontal order they appear on the screen, so it's easier to find the entry for a given window. If each was placed starting at the left hand edge of it's window, that would help too.

120) Word keeps claiming that I'm trying to write to a read-only file, even though I've gone and changed the permission to allow writing. Apparently, either Word or the file system is caching the permissions from when Word first opened it. Sweet. I can't rename the file on disk out of the way (not that I expect it would do any good), either, because the file system reports a file sharing violation (presumably because Word has the file open). The super kicker is that when I view the Properties for the file in Word itself it shows the permissions as allowing write access! Insanity! Furthermore, if I try and get at the file's properties via right-clicking in Word's Save file dialog, it reports that it "Cannot return file properties." What a complete and utter boondoggle. Wait, there's more: it asks you "the last time, this file was opened read-only. do you want it read-only again?" AUGH! Oh, here's an update: it also freaks out about the permissions on the backup copy of the file. So I quit Word, update the permissions on the file to make it writable, start up Word again, and then get an error about how since it cannot save to the backup file, it won't let me save my file at all. I have to go and delete the backup file before anything will work.

119) This is a real beauty: when you do a Refresh in the Win2k File Explorer, the sort order of the Details view is reset to the default ascending Name order. It blows out what you've chosen. Every time.

118) The Task Bar in Win2k randomly stops working. You can click on any of the entries, but the appropriate window isn't raised! I end up having to right click on the entry and selecting Maximize to get the window to appear.

117) Outlook doesn't remember which set of shortcuts I have open; I'd like to just have it start up with "My Shortcuts" but it insists on starting with "Outlook Shortcuts." I guess it's because then the Inbox wouldn't be visible. Eh, maybe we should just be able to redefine the shortcuts in the Outlook Shortcuts group?

116) Outlook doesn't seem to handle plain text formatting well. If you want to excerpt someone's text in your reply it is a pain. There doesn't even seem to be an auto paragraph wrapping ability.

115) (Maybe it's something strange about using this Kensington Expert Mouse with Win2k, but) The text I-bar mouse cursor in Outlook doesn't go away when you start typing. Instead, it flashes! Wassever. Is hiding a cursor when people are typing really that novel an idea?

114) Outlook gives you no tools for converting between HTML and plain text, and it's few measly formatting options don't even work in plain text mode. It's the nefarious HTML movement in action.

113) Sometimes, you want to be able to have focus in a window that is not on top.

112) There's no "lower" command for windows.

111) So I'm trying to figure out if there is a way to turn off the stupid "feature" that hides the least recently used items in a menu. There doesn't seem to be any obviously named option I could toggle, so I'm looking at things like the "Use Personalized Favorites" option. The beautiful thing is that when I search for "personalized favorites" in IE's help, there's no hit.

110) Why aren't there standard keyboard shortcuts for things like File Open and File Close? In fact, Word doesn't have any default shortcut for File Close.

109) Why doesn't Word have a "Revert..." command in the File menu?

108) There are special folders (My Documents, My Computer, etc.) which appear in folder listings e.g.: in the File Explorer and in Open... dialogs. However, they are not in the same order everywhere. Dumb.

107) Dr. Watson is supposed to help you debug your crashy apps. Unfortunately, some super genius decided to make the user interface utterly stupid. There's an OK button and a Cancel button. Since Dr. Watson doesn't actually do anything, it doesn't make any sense for there to be a Cancel button! Actually, you can clear out the error log, so I tested clearing it and then hitting Cancel. Well, when I went back to Dr. Watson the next time, sure enough the log was still cleared. Remember, kids, you can't spell the word whatever without the world hate.

106) If IE is off looking to load a page, and you go to some menu, then when the page finally does load, your menu can disappear out from under you.

105) There are now little arrow marks in the File Explorer's Details view name / size / type ... toolbar. Unfortunately, I think their mapping is wrong, since we read down lists, not up them. Note that WinZip gets it right. (I wonder which did it first?)

104) There isn't enough visual logging, given how software interacts in new and exciting ways to screw up your system. My Win2k box is now all screwed up during login (god only knows why): After I enter my password, the machine just sits there, and the desktop doesn't appear. I have to (get this) hit the magical ctrl-alt-del combination, and then suddenly that makes the desktop start up! Maybe if it told me what it was doing during start up I could debug it.

103) By default, Outlook makes use of the date email is received, rather than sent.

102) Win2k IE 5 changes it's Find/Search functionality depending on its mode. If you are looking at an FTP site, it brings up the Search window which is set to just search your hard drive. All I want to do is a textual search of the FTP listing that it has already downloaded; I just want the simple Find as if it were a web page. It's extra super annoyingly stupid because there is no option in the Search window for searching the FTP site. So there's utterly no functionality for searching the FTP file listing you have in your browser!

101) Focus still sucks. IE will put itself back in front of whatever you happen to be doing after a download finishes.

100) The File Explorer (IE) doesn't include the removable disks in its "Send To..." right-click menu. Smart. Very smart.

99) IE can't remember that I want my FTP views to be the Details style. I have to set it every time I start looking at a site.

98) For some reason, when I start up MSIE 5 on this here Dell, even though I press stop and then try to type in the destination I want, it still gets blown out with the stupid dell home page url. What the heck is the stop button for, then?

97) "Windows 2000 Setup does not support upgrading from Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional to Microsoft Windows 2000 Server." So you have to just nuke your system and start from scratch? I'm so impressed. Why can it upgrade from Win98, but not from a version of itself? That seems a lot easier on the face of it!

96) So, for whatever reason, my telnet application is randomly dying. Win2k puts up a dialog saying that it will write out a log file of what happened. It hasn't told me where the bloody log file was put, so I can't read it!

95) Why does Win2k have to reboot the machine (not just restart windows) when I change the font size in the Display Properties? That's insane! Like the font size is integral to the kernel or the file system or something?

94) MSIE 5 locks up for a while when it's trying to connect to an FTP site. It can't even redraw it's window contents. Once it connects, it comes back, but there's absolutely no feedback telling you what is going on. Most of the time I'm going via a hyperlink, so I didn't even know it was going to an FTP site, so pretty much it just looks like IE has wedged itself. Brilliant user interface implementation! Sheer genius!

93) The MSDOS command prompt just freezes up randomly.

92) Win2k still doesn't realize that when a process dies, all of its resources should be freed; I've had to constantly reboot because the port was considered to still be in use, even after I killed off my httpd, or because a file transfer program died, and I can't delete the file it was writing. This is insane, this is supposed to be a server quality OS!

91) IE 5 has too many different ways of indicating it is working, and they aren't consistent. Waiting on an HTML page, you see the world turn, but if you are looking at an FTP directory, it doesn't; instead, you get the little flashlight animation. So fairly often, it's not entirely clear if the app is working, done or just locked up!

90)

89) So I've installed Acrobat Reader, and whenever I click on a link to a PDF file in IE, it just gives me a blank page. It doesn't even make any indication that it is actually downloading anything. In fact, it just says "done" and nothing else ever happens... like actually showing the document. Of course, this could e entirely Adobe's screw-up. Oddly enough, if the link is a file:// url, it does work, and the PDF file shows up in IE. Of course, that mostly sucks, anyway, because a lot of screen real estate is devoted to the stupid toolbars, and now that it's a window inside IE you have IE's as well as Acrobat Reader's toolbars. I'd rather it just fire up an independent Acrobat Reader process and window. Furthermore, you do not get Reader's menu bar which means you can't do things like search for text in the PDF file! The way IE and Windows works these days with File Types makes it seem impossible to tell IE to fire up a new process, but that's pretty much doable in Netscape.

88) When an application has a modal dialog box up, and another application's window is covering it up, you can't just click on the blocked application's window to get it up front since the dialog has taken over control. You have to click on its entry in the Task Bar.

87) In IE 5, when you are viewing a web site there's a New Window command available under the File menu. If you go and view an FTP site, on the other hand, that command disappears! Modal Hell!

86) If you list the Control Panels in the File Explorer, in a Details view, there are the Name and then the Comment fields. The Comment field doesn't automatically extend all the way to the right hand edge, even though there are no other fields after it. Why on Earth would anybody want to have the last field truncated by default? Why doesn't it just resize itself to extend to the right hand edge? Furthermore, if you drag it's right-hand-edge out so that it does extend to the edge, you suddenly get a horizontal scroll bar, even when there is nothing off the edge. It's just totally screwy.

85) In IE 5, when you go to delete a Favorites folder (like the damned un-dead Links folder), it says something like "are you sure you want to remove the folder 'X' and move all its contents to the Recycle Bin?" even if the folder is empty, so I'm left there all worried that maybe I haven't actually already copied out important stuff. It's utterly stupid!

84) The Search in Win2k (which appears to just be a function of IE 5) will remember previous strings for fields, and give you the optional auto completion, but there isn't any little down arrow doohickey at the end of the text field to let you see previous searches and pick one.

83) In Win2k's Display Properties control panel, in the Advanced part, the buttons for working on the monitor drivers say "update" when what they really mean is "change."

82) The Win2k version of Notepad is stupid about saving files. If you start it up with a file named, say, server.conf and edit it and then go to save it (note that I am explicitly not using "Save As..."), it appends .txt to the name of the saved file.

81) Nobody cares about making completion bars work properly. The idea is to have it fill at a steady rate, not jump spasmodically about; the units are real time for the completion, not just a count of files or something. Win2k has two start up completion bars, one in text and then another graphical one. So all they are really saying is how much is left before you are done looking at that screen, not how much is left before the whole shebang is done.

80) In Win2k (at least) there's this sort of Outlook-esque set of shortcuts that shows up in Open File dialogs. It's got: History, Desktop, My Documents, My Computer and My Network Places. It doesn't, on the face of it, have any clear way of adding any such top level short cuts. I'm really annoyed that they don't have Program Files in there!

79) In Win2k they've replaced the logout/shutdown set of radio buttons with a drop down list. Since there are only ever like 4 options there, and I seem to be picking different settings fairly often (installing hardware, installing software, whatever) that's annoying!

78) In Outlook, when you are reading a piece of email (note that I did not say "an email") the headers are optionally displayed above the message. They are in their own little area. If you click on it, it turns blue (the selection color) to indicate, uh, something. I don't know exactly what. Anyway, you can't unselect it; it's pretty much blue from then on. It's really distracting, I just want to unselect it! Turns out you have to do something like click on a message to redisplay everything, and then it becomes unselected.

77) At least in Win2k, after selecting text you have to right click on the selected text to copy it. If you click outside the text, the selection goes away. This bugs me no end.

76) I'm trying to download the Direct X 7 installer for my machine at home. I'm doing it at work, where I'm running Win2k. When I go to the DX7 download area on Microsoft site, it tells me I'm running Win2k, and that's it: there's apparently no way for me to go get to something that would just let me download the damned thing. Sweet. This is all with MSIE; if I use Netscape Communicator, then I get a little bit further: it tells me I have to download IE 5 because I'm only allowed to use the Windows Update mechanism to get at things I want. So, in the end, I ended up finding the DirectX pages on the Microsoft site, thus circumventing the whole retarded Windows Update thing.

75) Applications (e.g.: the Win2k version of Notepad) still don't get the file dialogs right: If I start up Notepad with a file, then when I go to open another one or save one, I expect that it will default to the same directory the fist file was in. Instead, it seems to pretty much always pick something stupid.

74) Much like you can use alt-arrow in IE, I think you should be able to move up directories in the Open File dialog with alt-up. Or at least there should be some keyboard hot-key consistency across apps!

73) There is no consensus about what Page Up/Down should do. In some applications, they actually move the cursor. In others, they only move the view. I bet that sort of thing was fully specified by Apple.

72) IE 5 insists on putting a Links folder in my Favorites. If I delete the folder, since I don't want it, it just goes ahead and recreates it. This leads to the folders list being too long, and having the annoying "there's more" widget, so I can't see my folders!

71) Both Win2k and IE 5 do this thing where if a menu is larger than some arbitrary length, they lop it off there and put in widgets that you can click on to get the full menu. This is completely stupid and annoying, even more so because there doesn't appear to be any way to turn it off, or at least set the cutoff at something huge so it would just stop getting in my way. Furthermore, for the Programs list in the Start Menu, when you click on the widget to get the full list, the list is drawn in some utterly insane way so that some things are hi-lighted - and there's no clear reason why. Guess: it hi-lights the stuff that wasn't in the menu bar before... which still begs the question how does it decide what not to show in the first place?!

70) Is there still no way to force the screen saver to turn on? (E.g.: putting the mouse in the upper right corner of the screen.)

69) You can sort things in the Add/Remove Programs dialog, but there is no option to sort by date of installation. Sorting by "Date Last Used" doesn't seem to work worth a damn; I'm trying to uninstall a game I just installed, but that doesn't work under Win2k, and it doesn't show up at the top!

68) There doesn't seem to be much of an order to the applications in the start menu - maybe it's by order of date of installation, but actually I'm pretty sure it's not even that. It's unknowable. Why aren't they just alphabetically sorted, or something actually clear like that? (Update: someone claims it tries to list the most-recently-used ones, or most-often-used, or something. That would be okay if it was just one thing (and it was a duplicate, rather than a movement), or if it was like the Mac's Recently Used sub-menu, but this implementation is just way too insane, especially as a default and non-optional behaviour!)

67) MSIE has all sorts of different zones with different security levels. However, there is no way to save security sets. So if you hit a web page that sucks, you have to change all your security stuff, and then when you leave you'll have to go through and change all your settings again. Web sites are way too varied to just lump their security all together.

66) MSIE now tells you "The page cannot be displayed," and claims that it could be a problem with the site or it could be something else, like your security settings. Also, it doesn't give you the server's error message. You have no earthy idea what setting is causing the problem, or if it's really the server's fault. It pretty much makes debugging your JSP impossible. Oh, wait, you can apparently get the real error message tacked on after all the stupid "user friendly", and useless, stuff. Great. But you can't turn off that crap?

65) MSIE 5 doesn't turn 'zdnet' into 'www.zdnet.com' as far as I can tell. I was horrified at that when I first saw it, way back when, in Netscape, but I miss it now. It doesn't try to pre-pend 'www.' when 'javasoft.com' fails, either. If I had a nickel for every time that bit me, I'd smelt them down and make a bludgeon to use on the MSIE team.

64) Is there no way to just get bigger fonts in the "classic" folder view? I guess it's no longer the File Explorer, but MSIE itself, which makes me even more confused because you can do it for web pages really easily!

63) In this Internet Age, you'd think that the word boundary list when double clicking would include '.' already.

62) Would it have killed them to have given us a little more room for editing environment variables? Plus, when you use the mouse to select stuff, it scrolls too fast, but if you are using the cursor keys it scrolls too slowly (I guess that's alterable by the key repeat rate, at least). Anyway, the whole thing is obviously crap.

61) Look, I tend to add a bunch of bookmarks in a row to a folder. So put a "most recent" folder entry at the top of the folders list!

60) In IE, I'd like to be able to get a link to an image in a page without having to view the source and copy it out from there. I think if you right click on any image in a page, there should be an option for getting its URL.

59) In IE, if you select something from a scrolling list, go forward (like if you are choosing items to buy or whatever), then come back, your selection is now at the top of the list. I'd prefer it to be in the middle since I might be working my way up the list.

58) The dual monitor thing has some issues.

Consider an installer that runs through three dialog boxes. I move the first one to my secondary monitor. I do whatever needs to be done in that dialog, and click the Next button. The dialog goes away to be replaced with a new dialog - which is now back on the main monitor. Jerks. (This is like official and new MS software, as well!)
I want the Task Bar to exist on both monitors, and I want the windows on each monitor to only show up on that monitor's Task Bar.
Quake 3 Arena won't work unless you turn off everything but the main display.
RealPlayer doesn't like the 2ndary display. It ends up just showing a black screen. I can drag the same animation, as it is playing, over to the main screen and then you get to see stuff. Weird.
Java Swing doesn't like it; If you maximize a window on the secondary display, it tries to draw itself on the primary, and spooges. JBuilder, which is written all in Java, puts up a "licensing" dialog. The outline or frame for the dialog appears on my secondary display, while the actual content of the dialog appears on my primary and is all spooged. You have to click on the secondary display, roughly where you think the stuff that's not shown right would be!
If you set a wallpaper image, the settings (like center or stretch) take the lowest resolution monitor's values. Each desktop doesn't get it's own stretched version. I guess that's to save memory, but it sure looks really lame!
If a web page link opens a new window, MSIE puts it on the primary display, even when the first page was on a different one. The File Explorer does the same thing: if you open a zip file, it appears on the primary display.
You should be able to tell the system to put certain things on the secondary screen: I want all "Copying..." dialogs over there by default so they are out of my way.
You should be able to drag a maximized window to another monitor, without having to first un-maximize it, then re-maximize it after you've moved it.
Scroll bars on maximized windows are easier to overshoot into the adjacent monitor. You should be able to move the scroll bar to the other side (app specific support) or you should be able to put a slight delay on the monitor interfaces (desktop support).
MSIE's History window has a View menu. If I have IE on a monitor other than the primary display, the View menu never the less appears way over on the primary display!
I think there should be the option to map the mouse cursor between the monitors in a proportional fashion. That way, the top and bottoms would exactly match up, and anything in between would be relative to those. This would prevent the mouse from getting stuck at interface ledges, if you know what I mean.

57) The bookmark folders in IE appear in different orders depending on what mode you are in: they are sorted alphabetically when you actually see them in the Favorites menu, but they are all higgledy-piggledy when you are in the Organize Favorites dialog.

56) In IE, if you typed something in to a text field and hit return (like on a search page) then it starts looking for the new page. If you realize that you've typed something wrong and would like to abort before the page is loaded, so you don't have to hit the back button, it would be nice to be able to hit the escape key which is, I thought, supposed to be the same as hitting the stop button. Not so: it also clears out the text field you are in! This is especially annoying when you've mistyped an URL, and you want to just hit escape and then edit it. Instead, when you hit escape the URL goes away, replaced with the old one, which you could get using the Reload or Back buttons anyway.

55) The color picker is, well, a piece of junk.

54) MSIE makes a little clicking sound when I press things, and I can't figure out how to turn just that off. That stuff should appear in the sound control panel, I wish. I tried turning off the "Play Sounds" option in IE, but that didn't do it, of course.

53) Word (at least 2000) doesn't seem to let me split windows so that they are showing multiple buffers, with just one set of toolbars. Rather, I have to have full windows for each, and each has the toolbars. That takes up way too much screen space. I might even break down and say that here's a time when I'd actually like my windows to be kept within the application's root window.

52) The history won't let you sort by date within a given day. Also, it shows the site domain name - I'd rather have the page title.

The back and forward buttons' history menus are cut off! I haven't seen a way to make them longer.

51) If you use FrontPage (or god knows what else from MS), you get some non-standard character set which ends up rendering ? rather than ' in Netscape. (It's fine under Lynx, though.)

50) Most menus (e.g.: drop downs) go away if you click on their title again. The Start menu on the desktop toolbar doesn't do that. Also, as the NT system is starting up, it makes it look like you can use the Start menu but then if you do it too quickly the Start menu will appear but then quickly disappear. You get to play that little dance for a moment or two, until the machine is actually ready for you.

49) I never want to copy a shortcut rather than the file itself (unless I'm holding down a modifier key, maybe).

48) If I right click outside of an open menu, that menu should go away, and the one that would normally come up with the right click should come up.

47) If you want to send in a complaint about how broken IE is, you can do it via Their web site. Unfortunately, you need to enter in a product code, which is in the modal About Box and which, like all MS dialog boxes, doesn't support copy. You have to open a new window. (For a few moments there it looked like I was going to have to write the number down on paper, or something.)

46) If you've turned off e.g.: Java in IE and then hit a page which has an applet on it, you get a dialog saying something like "There's an active thingy on this page and your current security settings don't allow that so we aren't going to run it which might mean that the page won't function well." The problem is that several sites (e.g.: javasoft, ati) have an applet on every page (think: navigation bar). So every time you go to a new page on the site, you get the modal dialog, which you have to click on to dismiss before you can actually look at the page. (IE doesn't remember that you've already seen the dialog box on that page, let alone give you an option to shut it up permanently.)

45) Who are the marketing geniuses who designed the selection behaviour in IE's find dialog? Being 'smart' and forcing whole-word selection is bad. Also, the find dialog box used to be modal. Also, on some machines it couldn't properly remember the last thing I was searching for, if at all. Also, there are the Direction radio buttons Up and Down and on my machine, if you click on the space between the button and its label, nothing happens. Also, there's no "start the search over from the top of the page" button, which is useful when you are searching for several things in one single list, so you don't have to manually set the cursor back at the top of the page.

44) Don't get us started on the scroll bars. Sure, the Mac has similar snap-back behaviour, but the allowance is much bigger so it pretty much never ends up getting in your way, whereas the MS approach always does. Though, it appears the tolerance has been upped in Win2k, heavens to betsy.

43) J++ is bad. The find is bad (just one of many examples: you can't search in the Output window). The help is bad. The scrollbars have been made even more restrictive. The mouse cursor isn't hidden when you are typing. It picks an utterly random set of files to open from the default project when it starts up. It randomly goes into some wait where the hourglass cursor is up and it's sorta locked up and it doesn't tell you what it's doing so you have no idea why it's off in la la land or if it's ever really going to finish. There are no emacs keymaps available. When you are trying to pick the main class to run (in the Project Properties dialog) it's always doing this thing where clicking gets the pop-up menu, but then clicking on the scroll bar causes the menu to immediately disappear (fortunately nothing else happens, so the selection is left), but the 2nd time around the scroll bar works okay. Also, it doesn't help you figure out where a type is defined (you have to search for it in the Object Browser, which is junk). The Class Outline doesn't seem to let you list alphabetically so you could actually find things yourself. It doesn't blink matching parens. It doesn't have a "modify read-only" option; it forces you to try and check stuff out. You can't copy a cell from the debugger's variable view list, you can only copy an entire row. It doesn't even support marking rectangular selections via the alt key modifier. (Sometimes, for some random reason, the scrollbars start to flash. I have no idea why.) When you hit ^f to go into find, it only sometimes copies the selected text into the dialog.

42) How about a standard direct keyboard shortcut for closing windows? Like that's so hard? Like that isn't manifestly useful?

41) The menu bar changed so that it has less contrast when a menu item is hi-lighted; if you accidentally hit alt (which makes the keyboard focus go to the menu bar) then you don't have sufficiently strong visual cues; it just looks like the application has wedged. Or, if you hit alt by accident while you are in the middle of typing, all sorts of commands are fired as the keys map to menu shortcuts, and your hard drive gets reformatted.

40) The paper clip. THE PAPER CLIP!

39) Interdependent components: you can never really figure out what's causing bugs, let alone fully and safely uninstall. You cannot uninstall IE5. You can basically never go back to 3 once you've gone past it. I've been in situations where I'm trying to upgrade DirectX and all I get is an error dialog saying "Failed. Error -8." Literally. I've copy/pasted text in Word only to have it completely lose font size and style information in the process. Excel can't even redraw its selection boxes properly after it gets focus over another application. And you are left there with no clue why; it could be that the software is just bad to begin with, or it could be that component X4377Y doesn't like version 72b of component Gamma-9, but to get a setup that would work you'd have to reinstall everything from scratch, in a specific order, and things would be broken in other ways in the end, anyway.

38) Another "don't get me started on..." topic: 'Visual' Fox Pro. There isn't even an obvious way to copy and paste data, only convoluted ones.

37) Why not make sure that common choices (Open/Files of Type/All Files, or finding where to turn off the status bar) are guaranteed to be in the same place? Maybe there is some Apple-esque user interface guideline docs which tell application creators to be smarter than that, but they ignore it? I suspect there are no such documents.

36) Please, have all the options, which only get in my way, and claim they know what I want better than I do, turned on to begin with. That way, I'll promise never to buy your software ever again.

35) The behaviour of multi layered tabs seems problematic. Why do they reorder themselves? It's confusing. Maybe if there was a little animation which showed how they were being reordered, that would help. Instead, the user gets disoriented and then probably thinks to themselves, "Maybe the two rows are swapping. That's the best I can hope for, anyway. To figure out of that's the case, I'm going to memorize the two rows and see if they really do swap properly." They're left doing experiments on the UI to reveal its "intuitive" behaviour. (As an aside, the thing where you can scroll left and right along all the tabs isn't really any better. Generally, I think the best thing is to have the File Explorer-esque hierarchy, like newer versions of Netscape's options dialog.)

34) How about having a few more places I can mess with the volume settings, so I'm 101% confused?

33) How about having a few more places I can mess with the modem settings, so I'm 101% confused?

32) Windows forced to be inside windows is a Bad Thing.

31) Why does NT say it's writing files out to disk when I shut it down after several days of it just sitting there? Wouldn't it be obvious to a lobotomized cabbage that issues in clearing important file caches are the elapsed time and free cycles?

30) Every implementation of split buffers in MS apps (Word, InterDev) that I have come across is not very good; asymmetrical ui, autolayout decisions that you can't control, and which seem to have been designed to be maximally annoying. Maybe Excel does a good job?

29) The help interface is bad. Why can't I search for text in the page that's being currently displayed? Also, it seems like there are restrictions on how many help sessions you can have up; I've had one help window disappear so that another app's help could appear. Nice.

28) When text is selected, and I adjust the ruler in Word, it often fails to update anything. I have to move the doodads again once or twice before the app wakes up and notices that it should be doing something.

27) The window resize/close buttons shouldn't be next to each other. I aim for 'close' and sometimes hit 'maximize' or, even worse, vice-versa. Don't put killer things near anything else. (Is NextSTEP to blame?) Furthermore, why isn't there a feature like the Macintosh has had for, what, ten years? which resizes the window to contain exactly the contents? (Note: the new MacOS does the utterly stupid thing of putting the close box near everything else. Steve Jobs is only concerned with how lickable it all is. I don't like him.)

26) File exploring: IE doesn't remember that you've told it to be in a certain mode, like the 'details' listing; as soon as you open a new folder it reverts back to using the fat icons view. Why can't I copy the text showing the full path from the toolbar in the File Explorer? As if nobody would ever want to do that? I guess now that everything is turning into IE you'll be able to do that.

25) Why is it that the tree hierarchy widget in the File Explorer properly tries to line things up in the middle when you open them so you can see what's inside, but the one in VSS doesn't, so you have to open, then manually scroll down, then open, then manually scroll down...?

24) Why are mouse buttons polled less frequently than keyboard keys? If i'm using the find dialog, I have to explicitly pause between clicks, otherwise it misses some. The same thing with closing windows in InterDev. But if I use the enter key in the find dialog, it notices as fast as I can press.

23) When IE is loading a URL with an anchor tag in it, it doesn't change the cursor to an hour glass or anything. So if the page is large, and the target anchor is way at the bottom, it just looks like the link was wrong, since you are at the top of the page, not at the point in the doc you were trying to go to. Then you start to scroll down to try and find the place that you were heading for, and that cancels the 'seek to anchor' aspect of the page loading, further confirming your suspicion that the link was just wrong when, in fact it wasn't. Put up a wait cursor, for crying out loud!

22) The File Explorer cannot be looking at the floppy when you want to format it. The error message you get is utterly cryptic. Similarly with ejecting a ZIP disk. Or trying to delete folders above the one you're looking at; "Sharing violation" is not a helpful error message, and it's just plain stupid that I can't delete it in that situation.

21) When a file changes, it tends to show up as the last item in the File Explorer window, and you have to refresh to get it to be in the right place again. What is the point in having things sorted if they really aren't?

20) Why don't dialog boxes show up in the Task Bar? It's pretty easy to lose a dialog box when you've got multiple apps with multiple windows going all at once. Like control panels. (Instead, they had to make some really stupid alterations to it, like all the annoying flashing and toggle hiding stuff. Heaven forbid anybody make any sensible or useful alterations.)

19) It is frustrating when apps that aren't in the foreground suddenly shove themselves there just to put up a dialog box. It would maybe be okay if it was only for really urgent things, but it happens for anything.

18) IE downloads the file into some temporary location, apparently, then copies it over to the final destination. It puts up a dialog while it's copying. The dialog pops up in front of whatever you are doing, taking control and input focus. So if you happen to be typing, you may end up causing the copy to cancel, and then yer screwed. I cannot describe the extreme dislike I have for whoever implemented that whole thing. I think they are destined for a very particular spot in hell.

17) The keyboard interface for editors is bad (due to the history of keyboard design). The emacs key bindings aren't just more mnemonic, they are also farther apart generally speaking, which means you won't hit 'delete' when you are going for 'home'. Although, of course, I had to rebind quit since it was too close to the ^X prefix that is used all the time in emacs. So I guess that only goes to show that everyone is really stupid.

16) Web browsers tend to have this habit of putting the value of the href your mouse pointer is over into the status bar, so you can see where it will take you if you click. While IE has that, it subdivides the status bar into all sorts of useless areas, so the space alloted for the href is minuscule, barely even enough to show the host let alone the full url.

15) The media player thing that comes up when you are getting an AVI file off the web doesn't let you stop it part way through and just show what it's got. If you try to stop it it just exits, and you have nothing.

14) When I paste text into the find dialog in IE, the 'find next' button isn't activated! I have to type space or something on the keyboard for it to wake up! Also, the search doesn't look in form text field contents, which could be a handy feature.

13) IE does this thing where I click on a link and it's going to get the page and then when it finally does get the page it tries to be the top window; it interacts really badly with the virtual desktop utility I'm using. If I go to another desktop while IE is looking for the page, then when it does get the page it forces a switch back to its desktop. Strange and seemingly needlessly annoying.

12) You cannot copy out the full ip address in one fell swoop. You must copy each dotted part individually. Similarly, you cannot properly paste a dotted address into the field. That. Is. Utterly. Insane.

11) When the user opens a file in an app, then they go to "save as...," the program should default to the same directory the file came from. It seems like MS apps are designed to put you in the most inconvenient folder possible.

10) In excel, when entering times, "11:3" turns into "11:03" but it should turn into "11:30".

9) It would appear that the help in VSS is "always on top" which is annoying.

8) VSS has a check box for "Ignore OS Differences" on a file-by-file basis, but not on an entire project basis. That means you see a huge list of differences, but then when you compare the individual files it tells you that the files are, in fact, identical. We're talking about pretty much all the files; carriage return vs. line feeds, of course.

7) When you open the favourites menu, like you are adding a favourite, if the main IE window is too low and too short, the favourites window is opened and positioned such that it falls off the bottom of the screen. There tends to be stuff you want to click on down there, so you end up having to move the window up every time.

6) There are a bazillion options in MS apps: maybe how about letting me search for a specific string to find the one I want (inevitably to turn off), rather than having to go through help which seems to, fairly often, suck a lot and not have any info on the thing that is bugging me.

5) IE's text selection model is bad. E.g.: the "Address" (current location) text field won't select a word that's surrounded by periods when you double-click on it. Of course, it's utterly incompatible with Word, which at least gets that right.

4) The mouse wheel has different behaviour in the file explorer at times. If the contents of the folder fix within the vertical space, then there's no vertical scrollbar. If there's a horizontal one (as is most often the case for me) then the wheel controls that instead. I tend to not even notice if there is a vertical scroll bar, but instead spin the wheel. If nothing happens on the screen, then I know I'm at the bottom of the list or that everything fits. So it kinda bugs me that it decides to ever move the horizontal scroll position.

3) When opening a file in Word, the dialog hi-lights the first file (never sub directory!) in the directory being browsed. So if you are trying to dig down into sub directories using the keyboard, you constantly have to move the selection back up (unless you have very few files).

2) You should only make a window (dialog) fixed size if there's a really good reason. Like, the text in it is completely fixed. Otherwise, everything should be resizable. It bugs the hell outta me when there's a dialog that is for, say, picking files or something, and I can't resize the thing to see more of what I'm supposed to choose from.

1) When you are trying to select text to copy in IE (at least on the mac version 4.01), depending on the page layout, sometimes when you move past the end of the line your selection just goes away. You have to select only up to the end of the text; dragging the mouse any further past the end, and suddenly you have nothing selected! Then, there's the opposite problem where it can go nuts and just end up selecting everything on the page! Anything but what you obviously want it to do!