The high-quality Mac software by MS

[ericb@pobox.com (Eric M. Bennett)]

Humor?  Well, I guess not for the people affected, but stupid bugs in MS
software are always worth a laugh.


Vik Rubenfeld (VikR@aol.com)

       For many months, my Mac had been crashing once or twice a day, usually
       when I was closing an app, or using the Application menu to bring
       another app into the foreground. I posted email about this to
       comp.sys.mac.programmer.misc, and got a very valuable reply back from
       Troy Gaul, of Apple.

       TG> This will happen if an application is using a WDEF that has it's
       TG> Purgeable bit set on the resource.
       TG>
       TG> The problem is that if the resource gets purged and the Toolbox
       TG> tries to reload it when another application's resources are in use,
       TG> the resource will not be available and the system will put up this
       TG> system error. For me, System 7.5 and later seemed to worsen the
       TG> problem.

       I checked many apps, and found purgeable WDEFs.


Guess who!  Microsoft, of course.  MS Word 6 and MS Excel 5--the latest
versions of each program--have purgeable WDEFs (window definitions).  Now I
have a reason to download MSIE--to see if it also has them.  :-)



Eric Bennett ( ericb@pobox.com ; http://www.pobox.com/~ericb )
Cross-platform internet file format utilties at www.pobox.com/~ericb/xplat.html

Windows 95: Five years ago, corporate software giant, Microsoft, spent
millions of dollars, and put a team of hundreds of highly specialized
programmers on an extensive and highly ambitious project to find another
name for the Apple Menu.