0xe0000100
March 6, 2006
The Puli Brothers have this terrible problem. You see they tend to remember obscure statements that people make, and even worse, when someone says a situation will improve in the future, they are just silly enough to think things will get better. Silly Pulik.
For example, the Brothers remember Jim Allchin, the co-president of Microsoft’s Platform Products and Services Division telling them in his keynote speech at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in 1998 that:
“Improving the user interface is crucial. There need to be less error messages, and the ones that do appear need to be understandable. We have quite a few in Microsoft that we’re now in the process of looking through, and we need to figure out what we can do to increase the amount of auto-correcting in the information that’s coming to the user. I mean, asking somebody, you know, where their only response is OK doesn’t really make any sense.”
The Brothers appreciate that making such changes take time, but have things really gotten any better? Consider this error message from Windows Media Player running on Windows XP:
Windows Media Player Message—Microsoft Corporation Larger view…
The Brothers wonder why this error message has to display the very user friendly and easily intrepreted error id of 0xC00D116D and the equally useful remedy id of 0x00000000? Whenever the Brothers see a remedy id of zero they assume, despite the danger in making assumptions, that they are basically ‘s’ of out of luck.
And the Brothers wonder, why should they have to click on a link labelled troubleshooter? Is this situation really going to get better because some wizard starts up and asks them to supply some additional information?
Wouldn’t it be easier to just say: “Hey, we looked in all the usual places on this computer and well, we’re a little embarrased to admit we can’t find any software capable of playing a DVD. Seriously, we even looked in the back of the hard drive with all those programs you have never used, so we we’re wondering, is it possible that you don’t have any DVD playback programs? If this is the case, then our experience is that the fastest way to resolve this is to buy such a program. We could even suggest some that we think would work on your computer. Would you like to see what programs we recommend?”
So let’s cut Mr. Allchin some slack. Maybe in 1998 they were already hard at work on Windows XP, which was first released in 2001, and they couldn’t make the change without delaying the product. But here is an error message from a newer program, currently in development:
Setup Error Message—Microsoft Corporation Larger view…
Note: the image on this page was recreated in VBScript to make it more readable. The larger view shows the original image, taken with a cell phone, which was the only way to capture the image when it occured.
Now the Brothers struggle to write clearly and concisely, and they admit they have a lot to learn, but this message really gives them pause. The message starts: “The exception unknown software exception”—so what does this mean that something happened that the developer absolutely couldn’t, even in her wildest dreams imagine has just happened, or does it truly mean the operating system has no idea what the program just did. The curious thing is, someone was able to assign a code (0xe0000100) to something they didn’t expect.
The Brothers also find it extremely useful that the error message tells them that the error occurred at location 0x77e4028b in the application. They would have thought it that anything unknown would have occurred at location 0x77e4038b, but heck, what do they know. They’re just silly users.
So the Brothers will go off and type the error code into Google, and see if any one else has hit this issue and posted information or a work around. And they will do the same thing at microsoft.com, where they eventually found a paper entitled ‘Inside Update.exe’ that contains information about the same error code relating to a problem in the INF Runtime, that says ERROR_WRONG_INF_STYLE, but the Brothers are not sure that there is any relationship between update.exe and setup.exe. But at least the Brothers gain some satisfaction in knowing they tried to find an answer.
And still the Brothers felt compelled to take out a piece of paper, write down the message exactly as it was displayed, and then try to tell someone at Microsoft about it. Why they feel they have to do this they don’t really know, for they will be sending the information into a great void. It is very unlikely they will ever get an answer, or even a thank you for reporting it. Instead they will be forced to try to find a work around on their own, or install the program on another computer, or just give up.
All in all, the Brothers would have to conclude, almost eight years after stating a need to improve the error messages in its products, Microsoft still has a long way to go.