Microsoft Windows Annoyances

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I've created this page to chart some of the more common Windows annoyances that cripple people's productivity from day to day all over the world. With a little luck, you might be able to find answers to problems you've been suffering. If you have any favourite annoyances of your own, please contribute them - along with any fixes or workarounds you might have found!

Windows NT and Microsoft Outlook

  1. Take a Windows NT machine. Install Outlook 97 - check it works.
  2. Wait. Don't install any new software. Use Outlook only occasionally.
  3. After an indeterminate period, Outlook 97 will refuse to load, claiming:

    "Ordinal 36 cannot be found in MAPI32.DLL"

  4. Check Microsoft's support site. It's crap, and claims that there's more than one copy of MAPI32.DLL around. Or you're using Eudora (we're not). Or there's an 'R' in the month.
  5. Discover that something has copied a Win95 copy of MAPI32.DLL into C:\winnt\system32, and left the original as mapi32bak.dll
  6. Replace new Win95 MAPI32.DLL with old NT version. Software works.
  7. Go to step 2.

Windows '98 programs menu

Here's a particularly infuriating one. You can install and run Windows '98 quite happily, and the entries in the Programs menu accessible from the Start button are arranged alphabetically - to begin with, at least. Then one day you install a new program and, without so much as a by-your-leave, the newest program is added to the bottom of the menu and stays there. This can be very frustrating when the Programs menu is so long that it scrolls off the bottom of the screen. Does anyone know how to stop Windows '98 from doing this? (Other than uninstalling it, of course)

Solution?

I've just heard that there might be a method of fixing this problem, but I haven't tried it for myself yet. Try opening the Programs menu, moving the pointer over an item that has a drop-down submenu, and clicking the right-hand mouse button. If all goes well, you should find that you have access to the standard file menu containing the different 'Arrange' options.

Uninstalling software

I'm perfectly happy when a program asks me to insert its CD when I'm installing the package. After all, it's only natural that it might want to copy some data to the hard drive. However, there are some particularly loathsome programs that force you to find the CD when you wish to uninstall them - Microsoft Office '97 Small Business Edition, for one. There's no good explanation for this, apart from the fact that, after you've decided to purge your machine of a particular piece of unwanted bloatware, the people who designed the package want to put you through as much pain as possible.


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