As I’ve mentioned before, I run a teamspeak server. Last night Andrew dinged me and told me to log in. I had recently changed the ‘push to talk’ key in the preferences for the app to the F1 key, which I failed to remember is the key that launches the windows help center. So Andrew and I begin to chat. After a few minutes I start to notice the machine is getting sluggish, like REALLY sluggish, and I can hear the disk churning. WTF I think, I never noticed a memory leak in Teamspeak before. I manage to invoke the windows process manager and notice I have hundreds and hundreds of processes and cpu utilization is pegged? WTF? Turns out I had been spawning an infinite number of help center sessions as I held down the F1 key to talk – by the time I had recognized the problem the machine was already overwhelmed. I spent the next 15 minutes in a race against the cpu – could I cancel help session spawns faster than it was managing to launch them? It was like an annoying videogame – ‘kill the help center, woot!’

Long story short, I managed to. I didn’t want to cycle the power because I had downloads going. At first I was really pissed, ‘fucking windows,’ I am thinking. Then I remembered an incident from about 10 years ago on a mac. I was in a meeting when the sales manager burst in in a frenzy – ‘my printer is replicating like…like tribbles!’ Whu? Who wouldn’t go investigate such a claim. I get to his machine and sure enough, the little desktop icon for his printer is spawning a copy of itself every half second or so. By the time I got to the machine his entire desktop was already completely covered with a thick layer of printer icons. After some fiddling I decided to cycle the power on it. When it came up the printer had stopped cloning itself, but his desktop was still completely covered in icons, thousands and thousands of icons. I left him burrowing in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, laboriously moving icons out of the way in a search for the trash can so that he could begin throwing all these cloned printers out (this was before the days of CMD-delete, unfortunately for him). Later when I had time to research it I discovered it was a rare but known bug in the first implementation of Desktop Printing. This left me leery of desktop printing for years afterwords, even though it was the sales manager and not me who spent half a day shuffling printer icons around.

I guess my point is I shouldn’t be hard on windows. Why it is capable of spawning more than one help center I don’t know, it seems to me it shouldn’t be able to, but whatever. Computers, all OS’s, are full of niggling little issues like this. They’re still annoying when they occur but in the end for the most part as with the help center videogame from hell, what I end up taking away from it is amusement more than anything else.