So, I’m plodding along, running the usual half-dozen apps on my machine (oh, and a webcam capture to AVI). I try to save the AVI after a half-hour (yes, a huge file) and the disk thrashes for a while. (Not surprisingly. It turned out the AVI was 1.4 gigabytes. May have to reconsider this as a video-capture technique). I try to cancel an Outlook Send/Receive session, since it seems to be stuck, and I get the “Unresponsive application” dialog and terminate the app. Microsoft’s Online Crash Analysis (OCA) tool comes up and asks if it can send the data to Redmond. Sure, I say, and I encourage you to do the same. Bill Gates recently talked about how often Windows crashes, and I recall Steve Ballmer mentioning a while ago that they were surprised at the data they were getting. Let’s get them to clean up their acts, at least on this point.
So, off my data goes to Redmond, and I get a dialog telling me that more information is available, click here. I click, Mozilla starts, and I get an html page informing me that I need IE 5 or higher and a Passport account to continue. I know there’s a trick to tell Moz to pretend to be IE, but I don’t know it off-hand, so I have to switch my default browser from Moz to IE, click the link, and get taken to the page.
Which tells me they have no idea what the problem is, but there’s a new Service Pack for Office I might want to consider.
Now, really, did I have to switch default browsers (don’t forget to switch back!) just to be given a dumb look? Honestly.