Bug of the Moment

Bug of the Moment episode 225

Fri, 08 May 2026 21:09:57 GMT

This is one of those things that if you told anyone that you saw it, they would be quite sure that you were making it up:

With Windows 11, Microsoft insisted that we had to have a whole new File Explorer, because the old File Explorer’s context menus weren’t fluffy and powder blue enough. With it, they destroyed the ability to have simple verbs on file types (now you have to set up a development environment, learn programming and compile a DLL just to add a single verb to a file type) and took away all hope of ever using the truly invaluable True Launch Bar again. (Standalone mode is no use: it just gets in the way of other windows, and there is no way to make it float above the taskbar as the taskbar keeps burying it. True Launch Bar takes advantage of the unused space on the taskbar in a way that Microsoft made sure had to be taken away from everyone.)

Our reward for the continual erosion of anything good in computing was meant to be that File Explorer should now be stable and stop crashing, except that Windows 11 File Explorer is no better than its Windows 10 counterpart; now we have to sit and watch it draw in folder windows little piece at a time. It has now also decided that the Recycle Bin is just a regular folder.

Bug of the Moment episode 224

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 23:42:00 GMT

It’s no secret that I hate Microsoft Teams. Mostly this stems from the way that the original installer—as if out of pure spite—is completely incompatible with Software Restriction Policies. Simply running the installer as an administrator user is of no help as Teams could only be installed per-user.

Windows does finally have a new application installation system, that New Teams takes advantage of. Programs live in the exceptionally over-protected C:\Program Files\WindowsApps and multiple versions can co-exist side-by-side. This turns out to be similar to my dynamic map idea, with Microsoft’s liberal supply of bugs. For example, it’s not unknown for Windows to keep every single version of each of the bloatware it ships with (e.g. Candy Crush) and there is absolutely no way to remove old versions except tear a hole in the security and obliterate the directories. Windows completely loses track of what is going on and has no means to purge outdated package versions.

Now we come to two brand new Lenovo¹ PCs with Windows 11 Business 22H2. For some reason, neither one included New Teams. After updating each one to 23H2, the first one let me install New Teams (Work or School version) and the other would not:

App Installer helpfully tells me that Teams cannot be installed because the package “uses certain restricted capabilities”. It doesn’t say which capabilities, nor does it say who restricted them or why, or who is supposed to un-restrict them. Since this is a brand new PC, and a standard Microsoft package, this made no sense.

I had another attempt at downloading it in case the first package was corrupt or truncated:

Now Edge is concerned that the package “could harm your device”. The two package files are identical.

The wisdom of the Internet is that the version App Installer on the computer is too old. For some reason, the first PC managed to update App Installer and the second did not. Remember, these PCs were identical, and both had been fully updated. It’s not unusual however for Windows to stubbornly hold back updates when setting up a new PC, typically the outstanding feature update, which it won’t reveal until the computer has been left all night with its dunce cap on.

The solution is apparently to simply install Teams from the Microsoft Store, except that this version is not in there. Strike one.

The alternative is to upgrade App Installer manually. Microsoft give you two options. The first is to run the following command:

winget upgrade Microsoft.AppInstaller

All this does is draw a blue backslash and then turn the command prompt text blue, leaving the console tab in a permanent “spinning” state as if it’s waiting for something to complete. It does this regardless of whether you are using a PowerShell or a Command Prompt tab. Strike two.

OK, you can also download the App Installer installer and … install it using App Installer. End result? “Cannot open app package: This app package is not supported for installation by App Installer because it uses certain restricted capabilities.” Yes, the old installer version can’t figure out how to install a new version of itself either. Strike three.

Fortunately, another page suggests that you can use Add-AppxPackage in PowerShell to install the installer installation package directly. This works, without needing to enable developer mode and without any errors: all these “restricted capabilities” suddenly no longer apply, as if just maybe they never existed. This reminds me of the dfrg.msc fault from 2011 where Microsoft Management Console threw up a load of useless suggestions instead of the real error.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

¹ Not my choice, due to their certificate shenanigans …

Bug of the Moment episode 223

Fri, 08 May 2020 22:04:40 GMT

Backlog Roll-Up 1

I have never stopped collecting screenshots, and rather than dump them at the ends of the main gallery pages, I will be posting some of them here (maybe). Although some of them are a few years old, this does not excuse any of them, and nothing has changed in the industry since.

Way back in Windows 8, Microsoft renamed Windows Explorer to File Explorer. Well, mostly. In Task Manager it is still called Windows Explorer to this day:

Years ago, I took a screenshot of a remote session onto a computer where someone’s colleague had replaced his desktop background with a penis drawn in MS Paint. This has remained in my Pictures folder ever since. One day, Windows 10 started using this image as the folder contents of every new folder I created:

I don’t recall if it ever stopped doing that. It doesn’t now, after the drive failed and I rebuilt the OS. Twice, as the spare drive in storage only lasted two weeks and died completely. (The original drive is still bootable but freezes long enough to cause Windows to panic.)

I never ceased to be amazed at how Windows fails to get even the simplest tasks right:

Which app, exactly?

It appears that VMware have acquired a patent on pretty much the entire IT industry, and feel that they need to parade this achievement around:

Finally:

No.

Bug of the Moment episode 222

Thu, 19 Jan 2017 22:48:32 GMT

One frustration I always had with Microsoft Excel 2003 was that you could not deselect using ctrl+click. Ctrl+click would only ever add to the selection, and never subtract from it.

I figured that I’d check to see if, by 2013, Microsoft had finally got the hang of selecting.

The actual result was rather odd: not only does Excel still treat ctrl+click as add, but it also got confused and drew the row highlight twice. Or at least, that’s what I thought had happened.

Every ctrl+click darkens the region (rows, columns or cells) in question, until the cells are solid black. (So at least this demonstrates that they are drawing transparent black instead of transparent grey, which is a common mistake.)

I noticed that any actions that triggered a redraw, such as minimise and restore, scrolling, or resizing columns, did not clear the fault.

Therefore, Excel really did add to the selection. Since the selected cells are overlaid with a transparent grey rectangle, the increased darkness of the cells shows that Excel is adding the same rows, columns and cells to the selection repeatedly!

You can see that if I set the background colour of the cells, the different shades of grey in the selection remain preserved. In fact, just pointing to the colour palette causes the shading to disappear momentarily, and then return afterwards.

For all I know, Excel has always had this fault, and a new cell shading implementation has finally showed it up. I don’t have Office 2016 to hand, otherwise I would check to see if this bug is still around.

Bug of the Moment episode 221

Sat, 30 Jun 2012 23:56:46 GMT

One final entry

It’s time to call it a wrap with Bug of the Moment, and I think the following screenshot suffices nicely:

I’ve seen MAX_PATH get hit twice lately. In both cases, Windows Server 2008 R2 was involved. One of the situations involved being unable to retrieve files from Previous Versions because it had lengthened the path beyond the limit. The files were all backed up, but not retrievable from backup without fiddly workarounds. I would have thought that Vista/Server 2008 Previous Versions would be able to use \\?\* path notation to avoid hitting this problem, but no.

The screenshot is from the second situation, where I was trying to copy a large directory tree, and various subfolders hit MAX_PATH only on the target server. I was pleased to see that Windows Vista introduced a touch of intelligence to Windows Explorer’s error messages, but there’s still so far to go. Apparently a folder called “doc” has a path that is too long. A search of the source tree showed that many subfolders were called “doc”. Since “doc” is at most the straw that breaks the camel’s back, I cannot make any immediate derivation from knowing the folder’s name alone. (In fact, some of the “doc” folders contained files with ridiculously long names, but Windows was not going to tell me the names of the actual items that were causing the problem.)

From that dialog box alone, there’s not a lot I can do. I can’t display or save a list of the full paths of all six affected folders, nor can I jump to the folder in question. There is no auto-rename option.

I don’t imagine that Windows 8 will do anything to help any of the above, but maybe Microsoft will put some effort into making Notepad not suck, and giving Registry Editor an address bar and permitting it to be run within two different user contexts at the same time.

Oh well, that’s all folks.