> In general, if you're trying to do something simple (e.g., how do I change 
> the IE start page?), the documentation tells you. If you're trying to do 
> anything moderately nontrivial, the documentation tends to not help at 
> all... I guess this says something about their intended target audience?

Dunno, I've found lots of quite detailed articles before.

eg googling "windows recovery console" give me

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058

which tells me that you can use bootcfg without the /scan to avoid spending 
hours scanning all your drives.

> I don't know, but you'd think they could at least install an exception 
> handler around the load routine so that if it fails, it doesn't crash all 
> of Word, just the document load engine. Or *something*...

Maybe the load routine works fine, it just loads some corrupted data so when 
another part of the program comes to use it that bit crashes?

> OTOH, OO is developed by a bunch of bored boffins in their spare time, 
> whereas M$ can afford to hire the brightest people in the business and pay 
> them to work on the problem 9-5 every single day. Given the hugely 
> superior resources available to M$, you'd *think* they could produce a 
> product that works properly under forceeable circumstances...

I think you overestimate how many people MS has working on such things.  The 
main difference is MS can't just go and recruit 20 more people to work on 
something, unless it is going to be *profitable* for them to do so.  If the 
bored boffins at OO want to spend another 1000 man hours perfecting things, 
they can, they don't have to worry about profit.

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