I noticed you can crash a windows 98 computer by repeatedly pressing the 'windows key' before the microsoft login window appears, or before you load up the desktop. If you keep pressing it you'll get a "msgsrv32.exe caused a general protection fault in user.exe". Is this a known issue for all 98 os? That's pretty bad that you can crash it just like that by hitting the windows key. Can anyone else try this and verify for me? I've done this on many windows 98 machines, with or without the latest security updates installed too!

What is your point?

It is alomost impossible to write software that will prevent problems when the user does stupid things.

Just for the hell of it I tried it on W98SE. Yep, it crashed (but not in the way you described). The point here is that when Windows is loading it is a fairly crucial time, setting itself up and so on. The answer is not to press the Windows key when loading. In fact it is best to keep your hands right off the keyboard until it has finished. I can't imagine why MS should have spent a long time preventing this. ham30 is right. Derek.W

I noticed this as well many years back. It only needs to be pressed once though, and it can also be used to mess up the shutdown process in some situations. So you're probably wondering why people like me did stuff like this. I'll explain: Initially, I used the Windows key in the Windows 95 days for useful purposes, such as bringing up Task Manager before explorer loaded. Why? Because there are times when I want to maximize my available resources by circumventing the login window. I may want to manually load a single app from Task Manager (such as Nero or a web browser nowadays) without having explorer, systray, or anything else up. In doing this, none of the automatic startup items launch in this pre-explorer state. That includes anything from the Startup folder, Run keys in the registry, and others. In addition, it makes shutdown and restart times much faster if the explorer shell is never initialized. Naturally I carried on this habit of hitting the Windows key during the startup of Windows 98, but was rather displeased with the results when I'd hit it too soon. Of course since we are on the subject of crashing Windows, it's easy to GPF Windows 9x with numerous variations of the double reserved DOS device name bugs. You can also make Windows 9x hang from any app that has an MDI interface (child windows within parent windows) such as the old File Manager, Sysedit, Excel 95/97, etc. Just maximize any child window, hit the Alt key once, hover your mouse over the Minimize, Restore, or Close buttons in the child window, then press the Space bar. Enjoy the big freeze. :) For even more fun, there are some great ways to make every single app crash on Windows 95. This comes complete with a continuous alternating mix of the Win 95-style illegal operation crashes, Win 3.1-style crashes (white unmovable centered window with Close and Ignore buttons), and DOS-style crashes (fullscreen blue GPFs) until you have nothing left but your wallpaper. This can be done by playing with a screen saver and exploiting a glitch that keeps the Alt-Tab window up when it shouldn't be, but that's another topic. :)