Dangling locks

In Office, when you work on a document on a "windows share", a lock is put. This is the same approach in Visual Source Safe, exclusive locking. Most of the time, it's completely useless, because there is someone in charge for the file edition (but the Office programs don't let you view a document in a simple way). If there are several people in charge of some piece of work, for God's sake, don't use a format which is not externally diff'able. So, locks are put... and they are removed when all goes well, that is, most of the times. And when something happens:

• Word goes nuts (just try Word 2002 on Windows XP, you have a 2 hours TTL)
• a "windows share" unproper disconnection
• windows (from W2K, windows isn't less buggy, but bugs don't lead systematically to a GPF anymore)

the lock is lost, and your stupid Office program is proud to announce that the document is locked by yourself when you try to reopen it. The solution? Reboot 3 times. Have fun.(Cyberpunk, 2003/06/04 10:44) lien permanent

Days like this, I want to throw windows through the window

For three hours now, I try to reinstall the driver for my Wacom tablet. Multiple install, uninstall, registry cleaning, safe mode reboot for erasing protected files... No error message during the installation, no message in the system logs, but no uninstaller appears into the add/remove control panel. And the Wacom control panel fails with a miserable "No driver found" message.

And eventually, a lightning strikes me, some months ago, I set the Wacom NT service to Manual...(Cyberpunk, 2003/06/04 10:42) lien permanent

Time to format... soon...

I can't synchronize anymore my PDA via infrared, PInstall fails miserably whatever the connection, Outlook takes ages to start and refresh... It's time to do a clean install of Window$.(Cyberpunk, 2003/06/04 10:41) lien permanent

Cleaning windows...

1.64GB

That's the place taken by c:\windows. Add to this "Documents and settings" (I've removed "My Documents" from it), and "Program Files\Common Files", and "Program Files\Accessories", and "Program Files\Internet Explorer", and you will have the true size of the so called operating system.

Some people will say "it's because the silly programmers are polluting the Windows\System32 directory". The silly programmers put files where Micro$oft Best Practices advise them to put.

So I end up with a dilemma: to format or not to format? Whether it is nobler... I don't fear reinstalling Windows, since the 3.1 area, I guess I count maybe 100 installations. The problem are:

• Micro$oft Office: it's the corporate edition, and I've a master image for windows 98, thus I need the Office CD in order to make Outlook and some other parts to work under windows 2000.
• Reinstall all the other programs: I can't just export my registry and reimport it, because there is a too big risk that I break something. I would have done it if "regclean" was still supported by Micro$oft, but they say that it will break any M$ Office 2000 install. So I'm stuck.
• Windows updates: after SP3, I must manually choose the fixs, because some are buggy and prevent me from using some peripherals.

Not format means living with this unmanageable system, its 3000 dll, and the fear to break something if I ever dare to manually clean it up.(Cyberpunk, 2003/06/04 10:41) lien permanent

Counter-productivity has a name

Microsoft Word 2002

• not reproducible behaviour
• ugly styles management
• unlimited hability to automatically destroy a layout
• obstrusive interface

Why upgrade? Because you're forced to!(Cyberpunk, 2003/06/04 10:40) lien permanent