Often I use my Car Wash Analogy when explaining cause and effect to my students.
In a nutshell:
If I take my car to the wash 3 times, and all 3 of those days it rains afterward, I may not have necessarily caused the rain.
Simple, yes?
Or, as Michael Müller-Hillebrand [mmh@cap-studio.de] eloquently noted recently at frameusers.com
Excuse my not very helpful answer, but if something goes wrong it is not necessarily the fault of the front-most application. Todays operating systems and software are very complex and Windows 7 has not yet seen a Service Pack. Like [someone else] said.
Of course, the original poster was merely trying to recover from a horrible problem, but in the midst of it, was unnecessarily stirring the pot among forum users across the world. To shout [Application Version X: Major Bug] rather than [Huge Problem: Please Help] without independent verification is not helpful. At the least, one should determine if the issue exists on a relatively bare-bones install before blaming it exclusively on an application.
Having said that, before shouting »Major Bug« please take a second to verify your observations. If something goes (horribly or not) wrong, it is only an application’s bug if it can be reproduced and the reporter has at least tried to exclude as many other influences as possible.
And if it is reproducible on one machine, but network access or file system or fonts or printing are involved, I urge users to try it on another machine to exclude local configuration problems.
Why all those efforts? Without a reproducible case you won’t find a person or company to investigate the problem unless you are a $$$$$ customer.
You seem to have a good record of what exactly you did. Can you reproduce what you have seen?
- Michael
I expect I’ll refer back to this blog often!
