Pete's Log: bugs that bug me (Vol II)

Entry #1607, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)
(posted when I was 30 years old.)

One easy way of generating daily entries is to start posting some of the various postponed entries I've got going on. To that end, I present Volume 2 of my running feature on various bugs (or annoying "features") I encounter. (Volume 1)

I have my home folder from our office file server marked for offline use, which means Windows keeps a copy of its contents on my hard drive and synchronizes regularly. Not a bad feature, except that Windows picks odd times to try to synchronize. I have it set to only synchronize when I log out. Yet frequently it will try a synch when a network connection comes online. This annoys, since it takes a while to timeout, even when I hit the cancel button.

More annoying, and somewhat mysterious, was a recent occasion when I was away from the office, and thus working with the offline copy of my home folder. It's mapped to drive letter P: (for Pete, obviously). I inserted my USB stick to copy some files off it. Stick got mapped to F:. Open F: and see the files from P:. Odd. Try accessing F: via command line, via cygwin bash shell, no luck. Try inserting into different USB port. Still shows me the P: files. Insert stick into other computer. The proper files are still there. Create a dummy file on stick, just to alter its contents somehow. Reinsert to laptop. Still shows me my P: files. Reboot fixes the problem. Silly Windows.

The Symantech touchpad thingy showed up in my notification area again. I'd disabled it some time ago. Open its preferences, and it's still on the setting to keep out of the notification area. Hit OK without making any changes, and it promptly disappears from my tray.

A Cisco 7206VXR Router. Set an interface to admin down. Query the interface and its subinterfaces via IOS: all of them report admin down. Network management system still thinks subinterfaces are admin up, and thus generates alarms because they are oper down. SNMP Query shows that the router does in fact report the subinterfaces as admin up via SNMP, despite reporting them as admin down in IOS. Why can't anybody get SNMP right?!

Office clipboard keeps coming back, even though I keep turning it off!

Inconsistent UI in Office 2003: if I have multiple Excel files, they appear individually in the task bar -- seemingly SDI behavior. But if I clicky the x to close the window, it closes all Excel Windows -- MDI behavior. I have to remember to click the x for the document, not the x for the window. Yet in Word, the x for the window closes only the one document, not all word windows.