Windows woes

[Walter Bright]

A few days ago, Outlook Express starting acting flaky - my account names 
were forcibly converted to 1, 2, 3, etc., and retyping in the correct ones 
refused to stick. Then, windows update started failing with useless messages 
consisting of 8 digit hex numbers.

So I thought I'd try Microsoft update tech support (which is free for update 
failures). They asked me to send them logs, which I did. Then, came an 
endless series of "try this ...", which usually involved unregistering a 
dozen dlls, rebooting, starting/stopping services, reregistering them, 
renaming system files, booting in safe mode, wiping directories, deleting 
files, rebooting, rebooting, all to no avail (except the 8 digit hex number 
would change).

Then came the exhortation to run a virus scan, with a couple links. The 
symantec virus scan crashed after a half hour. The other one completed, and 
found nothing.

At this point, it was apparent that tech support had no idea why this was 
happening, and I was beginning to worry there was either a rootkit 
installed, or there was just creeping corruption going on. I gave up on 
Microsoft tech support, and decided to reinstall Windows.

Do you know it takes THREE HOURS to install Windows from scratch? Gads, you 
install XP from the CD which requires rebooting several times, then again 
from the XP SP2 update CD (rebooting n more times), then you log in to 
Windows update and update/reboot 4 or 5 more times. Why can't Windows Update 
download everything at once and reboot only once?

So now I've got Windows reinstalled. Now comes the dance of reinstalling 
everything else. The worst is, of course, Outlook Express which completely 
loses track of everything after a reinstall. I have a crib sheet of most of 
the settings, but even so, there's no way to restore which newsgroup files 
are read/unread. I also use the undocumented method of finding which 
gawdawful directory O.E. squirrels the files away in (all in deeply nested 
hidden directories with 80+ character tty noise filenames) and 
saving/restoring the dbx files manually.

Most of the other apps aren't too bad, if you were smart enough to keep a 
crib sheet of all the serial numbers, registration numbers, and funky 
passwords. The whole job takes about 12 hours.

Morals of the story:

1) Keep a crib sheet of all the settings, passwords, serial numbers, 
registration follderalls, etc.

2) If you're going to provide an update program, fer cryin out loud, make it 
a monolithic program that doesn't depend on everything else in the OS 
working perfectly. After all, when you need it, it's probably because the 
rest of the system isn't right. And if the update program itself is 
corrupted, then tech support can just send you a new one.

3) If you're writing an app, don't require it to be reinstalled if Windows 
is reinstalled. DM programs don't need to be. Store your configuration in 
some text file that can be saved/restored. Please!

4) If you're going to need to muck about with the system registry, do it 
like Quicken does. Quicken has a menu item "Backup" which, amazingly enough, 
backs up all its settings and crud to a file you specify. Then, I reinstall 
Quicken from the CD, hit "Restore" and give the file name, and it fixes 
itself. Quicken is full of horrible design choices, but at least they got 
that right. No other app I've used does that.

5) Never, ever install anything with DRM on it on your work computer. DRM 
often involves rootkits, installing new drivers that destabilize your 
system, etc. This includes most game software. Use a separate computer for 
DRM, one that you won't mind regularly reinstalling Windows on.

There, I feel better now <g>.