Free Download Manager WTF



  • While trying to download a program, I encountered this:

    WTF screenshot



    It had been running at really slow speeds previously.. less than 8000 bytes per second. A few seconds after encountering the huge time remaining amounts (which were constantly changing) the download finished.



  • "... and here's a little extra for ya, just in case"

     

    I'm intrigued by the C folder on your C drive. 



  • @dhromed said:

    "... and here's a little extra for ya, just in case"

     

    I'm intrigued by the C folder on your C drive. 

    So am I =) It reminds me of this bug which is quite real:

    Link to a Folder C:\C:\\Alii\Home\


  • All my stuff goes in the C folder. Helps organise it from the rest of the things in the C drive, and makes backups easier as I can just copy over the entire folder. (I don't use My Documents.) Why the name C? It's easy to type when extracting a Zip file, for example.



  • @Treeki said:

    All my stuff goes in the C folder. Helps organise it from the rest of the things in the C drive, and makes backups easier as I can just copy over the entire folder. (I don't use My Documents.) Why the name C? It's easy to type when extracting a Zip file, for example.

     

    *Head pops* 



  • I remember submitting a bug report a long time ago about GetRight for some reason letting downloads go up over 100%. You were patiently waiting for your download to finish (this was on a 33.6 modem), only to discover that it goes all the way up to 124%. Frustrating!



  • Why not use the 'My Documents' folder? 90% of the time you don't even need to type.

    I had this discussion with my ageing aunt, she learnt computers before I was born, and I was trying to dissuade her from archiving stuff in the Recycle Bin, and storing stuff in C:\WPD5. I discovered this mess when she phoned me up claiming she needed a new computer, when all she needed was to empty the 5000 or so documents from the bin.

    Who knew 5000 documents in the Recycle Bin were enough to slow it down to a crawl? Who knew the Recycle Bin made a great archiving tool because you can store more than file with the same name?



  • @Treeki said:

    All my stuff goes in the C folder. Helps organise it from the rest of the things in the C drive, and makes backups easier as I can just copy over the entire folder. (I don't use My Documents.) Why the name C? It's easy to type when extracting a Zip file, for example.

    I think you need a new partition.



  • @Treeki said:

    All my stuff goes in the C folder. Helps organise it from the rest of the things in the C drive, and makes backups easier as I can just copy over the entire folder. (I don't use My Documents.) Why the name C? It's easy to type when extracting a Zip file, for example.

    I will never take "~" for granted again.



  • @yet another Matt said:

    Why not use the 'My Documents' folder? 90% of the time you don't even need to type.


    Matter of taste.  I myself have "Work" and "Personal" folders on the desktop, because "My Documents" is full of sub-folders auto-created by various programs that I rarely want to access directly.

     



  • @emurphy said:

    @yet another Matt said:

    Why not use the 'My Documents' folder? 90% of the time you don't even need to type.



    Matter of taste.  I myself have "Work" and "Personal" folders on the desktop, because "My Documents" is full of sub-folders auto-created by various programs that I rarely want to access directly.

    My argument as well. 



  • @dhromed said:

    @emurphy said:
    @yet another Matt said:

    Why not use the 'My Documents' folder? 90% of the time you don't even need to type.



    Matter of taste.  I myself have "Work" and "Personal" folders on the desktop, because "My Documents" is full of sub-folders auto-created by various programs that I rarely want to access directly.

    My argument as well. 

    I just do it to be unique and different. 



  • @dhromed said:

    @emurphy said:
    @yet another Matt said:

    Why not use the 'My Documents' folder? 90% of the time you don't even need to type.



    Matter of taste.  I myself have "Work" and "Personal" folders on the desktop, because "My Documents" is full of sub-folders auto-created by various programs that I rarely want to access directly.

    My argument as well. 

    Agreed. At work I switch them to hidden, as they are annoying, but at home, I use them when appropriate. Most of my documents I put on my memory stick, then back it up on a network drive. But writing to the root drive, I would not do.

    As I explained to my aunt; it's not really wrong, there is not a reason why you shouldn't do it. It's just a sign of when you learnt your computing techniques.



  • emurphy:
    yet another Matt:

    Why not use the 'My Documents' folder? 90% of the time you don't even need to type.



    Matter of taste.  I myself have "Work" and "Personal" folders on the desktop, because "My Documents" is full of sub-folders auto-created by various programs that I rarely want to access directly.
    Yep -- And I usually install software in the C:\Programs directory, so I can clearly distinguish between consciously installed stuff and stuff that finds its way onto my hard disk some other obscure way.


  • @TheRider said:

    emurphy:
    yet another Matt:

    Why not use the 'My Documents' folder? 90% of the time you don't even need to type.



    Matter of taste.  I myself have "Work" and "Personal" folders on the desktop, because "My Documents" is full of sub-folders auto-created by various programs that I rarely want to access directly.
    Yep -- And I usually install software in the C:\Programs directory, so I can clearly distinguish between consciously installed stuff and stuff that finds its way onto my hard disk some other obscure way.
    C:\program files\xerox ftw! And \MSN Messenger and the near empty \microsoft frontpage


  • @Lingerance said:

    ... and the near empty \microsoft frontpage

    *spit* *foam* *froth*

    There must be a way to get rid of that folder. WINLOGON appears to create it for fuck knows what reason -- you can remove it by deleting the handle it holds on it, and then remove the folder tree. But it gets recreated all the same. I can't understand what on earth Windows needs to do with FrontPage on log-in, when the OS doesn't even ship with it in the first place. There must be, somewhere, a hack you can download and install that stops this happening, or a Registry tweak to disable it. Somewhere!



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    @Lingerance said:
    ... and the near empty \microsoft frontpage

    *spit* *foam* *froth*

    There must be a way to get rid of that folder. WINLOGON appears to create it for fuck knows what reason -- you can remove it by deleting the handle it holds on it, and then remove the folder tree. But it gets recreated all the same. I can't understand what on earth Windows needs to do with FrontPage on log-in, when the OS doesn't even ship with it in the first place. There must be, somewhere, a hack you can download and install that stops this happening, or a Registry tweak to disable it. Somewhere!

    Seems like it has been fixed in Vista.



  • D:\home\sam\Desktop\Sam\Desktop\backup-20073120\home\kiasyn\kiasyn.com

     

    actual path =/ 



  • @XIU said:

    Seems like it has been fixed in Vista.

    If a useless folder that I can't get rid of is the cost of sticking to Windows 2000, so be it =)



  • So what else did you do on the 31st of...wait...what?



  • @Kiasyn said:

    backup-20073120

    I understand the 2007, but what's 3120? 31st day of the 20th month? 20th day of the 31st month? What the failure!?

     

    djork: Even Windows doesn't make you type out "C:\Documents and Settings\user name\".  Instead you can use the %USERPROFILE% environment variable.  Or even shorter, "C:\Doc*\us*".  Or the other anti-long-filename trick, "C:\docume~1\userna~1".

    ~ is so much easier...
     



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    @Lingerance said:
    ... and the near empty \microsoft frontpage

    *spit* *foam* *froth*

    There must be a way to get rid of that folder. WINLOGON appears to create it for fuck knows what reason -- you can remove it by deleting the handle it holds on it, and then remove the folder tree. But it gets recreated all the same. I can't understand what on earth Windows needs to do with FrontPage on log-in, when the OS doesn't even ship with it in the first place. There must be, somewhere, a hack you can download and install that stops this happening, or a Registry tweak to disable it. Somewhere!

    It's WFP. Due to an inexcusable bug in one of the APIs used by this fundamentally flawed misfeature, in order for WFP to be able to 'protect' certain files that can be placed in that directory when frontpage is installed, it has to force the directory to exist all the time, even when frontpage is not installed. winlogon is just the first point in the boot process when WFP starts (along with about half the system), it's otherwise unrelated.

    The military describes this kind of thing as a "clusterfuck" - a sequence of disasters which combine to create a spectacular mess. 

    Any of the WFP hacks will deal with it, but as always they are a pain in the arse to install, and somewhat crude in their operation.



  • @ince said:

    So what else did you do on the 31st of...wait...what?

     
    thats actually a really good question... why the hell is the folder named that =/ 



  • Whats wrong with making more than one partition?

    I have to shamefully admit to going overboard with this once... I ended up with 12 partitions on 2 80G drives, some full to brim, some read only(NTFS remnants in Linux) and as I later found when doing an inventory for clean install, 30G space unpartitioned in the middle of one drive and thus not mounted anywhere... That discovery was a true WTF moment...

     In my windows days I practiced the art of installing windows on anything except C... Some of the nasties where too stupid to use environment variables to figure out where win was:P
     


     



  • @asuffield said:

    It's WFP

    Ah, that makes sense now. I wonder, whether it's related to FrontPage extensions for IIS, since IIS does ship with Windows 2000 (FrontPage does not). Process Explorer shows me the list of all the handles that WINLOGON holds on folders, presumably for WPS, and FrontPage Extensions for IIS would not be too implausible a cause, since those were included in the list of handles. Perhaps a case of Windows getting the wrong idea of what's installed and what needs to be protected. I mean, it doesn't have any IIS DLLs to put back -- my home Web server was my old Mac.

    I closed the handle to the microsoft frontpage\3.0\bin folder, and all other handles it had open closed simultaneously, which was odd. Sort of throwing its hands up in the air and giving up protecting anything. Not that it would be reasonable to expect any of it to make sense really.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    @asuffield said:

    It's WFP

    Ah, that makes sense now. I wonder, whether it's related to FrontPage extensions for IIS, since IIS does ship with Windows 2000 (FrontPage does not). Process Explorer shows me the list of all the handles that WINLOGON holds on folders, presumably for WPS, and FrontPage Extensions for IIS would not be too implausible a cause, since those were included in the list of handles. Perhaps a case of Windows getting the wrong idea of what's installed and what needs to be protected. I mean, it doesn't have any IIS DLLs to put back -- my home Web server was my old Mac.

    I closed the handle to the microsoft frontpage\3.0\bin folder, and all other handles it had open closed simultaneously, which was odd. Sort of throwing its hands up in the air and giving up protecting anything. Not that it would be reasonable to expect any of it to make sense really.

    WFP is a Front Page WTF.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    Perhaps a case of Windows getting the wrong idea of what's installed and what needs to be protected. I mean, it doesn't have any IIS DLLs to put back -- my home Web server was my old Mac.

    As I said, it's a clusterfuck - it has to force the directory to exist even though it's not installed, in order to function 'correctly' if you were to install the relevant frontpage components, because the underlying API craps out if you try to use it on a non-existent directory and this would prevent WFP from noticing that you had installed the components.

    The whole thing was designed by rabid weasels who hate you. 



  • @asuffield said:

    ... it has to force the directory to exist even though it's not installed, in order to function 'correctly' if you were to install the relevant frontpage components, because the underlying API craps out if you try to use it on a non-existent directory and this would prevent WFP from noticing that you had installed the components.

    lol .. what a mess. I guess it is the FrontPage Extensions that it's protecting, though, otherwise it would be pre-creating folders for every MS product in existence, which would be tragically unfunny.

    @asuffield said:

    The whole thing was designed by rabid weasels who hate you.

    Weasels, eh? I've made my fair share of enemies in my time, but I don't recall crossing paths with weasels before. There was that episode with the stoats, but maybe I got confused at the time (it shouldn't be hard -- weasels are weasely recognised, but stoats are stoatally different.) Still ... pop! There goes another one. That'll larn 'em.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    I guess it is the FrontPage Extensions that it's protecting, though, otherwise it would be pre-creating folders for every MS product in existence, which would be tragically unfunny.

    The choice of which files are covered by WFP in winxp appears to be completely arbitrary. I suspect that some MS intern just made up a list from everything that sounded important.



  • @asuffield said:

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    I guess it is the FrontPage Extensions that it's protecting, though, otherwise it would be pre-creating folders for every MS product in existence, which would be tragically unfunny.

    The choice of which files are covered by WFP in winxp appears to be completely arbitrary. I suspect that some MS intern just made up a list from everything that sounded important.

    Notepad is a protected file.

    Yes, Notepad.

    You can see some funny behaviors when including files that were originally protected in an MSI based installer and then subsequently installing those files on a clean machine.  After doing that, replace notepad.exe in the target location with calc.exe named as notepad.exe and note that notepad still launches and not calc like you would expect.  I believe that works correctly.

    eg, Build an MSI containing notepad.exe and install it to C:\Program Files\MyTestFile.  In MyTestFile replace notepad.exe with calc.exe from that system's %WINSYSDIR% and launch your shortcut.



  • @asuffield said:

    It's WFP. Due to an inexcusable bug in one of the APIs used by this fundamentally flawed misfeature, in order for WFP to be able to 'protect' certain files that can be placed in that directory when frontpage is installed, it has to force the directory to exist all the time, even when frontpage is not installed.

    I wouldn't call this a bug. The reason to monitor 'program files/xerox' folder is not clear to me; let's assume that Xerox screwed up and released drivers that sometimes hang up the OS. So, WFP has to replace the drivers in 'xerox' folder as soon as they appear.

    There are two options to do this:

    1) Monitor changes of the 'program files' folder, waiting for the 'xerox' folder to appear

    2) Create the 'xerox' folder and  monitor changes to it.

    Obviously, the first option would consume more resources; the only problem with the second is irritation of some 0.001% of users. The choice isn't hard to make.



  • @IMil said:

    @asuffield said:

    It's WFP. Due to an inexcusable bug in one of the APIs used by this fundamentally flawed misfeature, in order for WFP to be able to 'protect' certain files that can be placed in that directory when frontpage is installed, it has to force the directory to exist all the time, even when frontpage is not installed.

    I wouldn't call this a bug. The reason to monitor 'program files/xerox' folder is not clear to me; let's assume that Xerox screwed up and released drivers that sometimes hang up the OS. So, WFP has to replace the drivers in 'xerox' folder as soon as they appear.

    There are two options to do this:

    1) Monitor changes of the 'program files' folder, waiting for the 'xerox' folder to appear

    2) Create the 'xerox' folder and  monitor changes to it.

    Obviously, the first option would consume more resources; the only problem with the second is irritation of some 0.001% of users. The choice isn't hard to make.


    Alter the sys-calls that make directories and trigger whenever something starts with C:\Program Files\xerox would IMO be alot less CPU intensive and considering how fast other operations on MS usually are there wouldn't be much of a performance impact.



  • @Lingerance said:

    Alter the sys-calls that make directories and trigger whenever something starts with C:\Program Files\xerox would IMO be alot less CPU intensive and considering how fast other operations on MS usually are there wouldn't be much of a performance impact.

    And I believe this is what they did in Vista, although I haven't checked to see if WFP is still as stupidly broken there. 



  • @asuffield said:

    @Lingerance said:

    Alter the sys-calls that make directories and trigger whenever something starts with C:\Program Files\xerox would IMO be alot less CPU intensive and considering how fast other operations on MS usually are there wouldn't be much of a performance impact.

    And I believe this is what they did in Vista, although I haven't checked to see if WFP is still as stupidly broken there. 

    Windows File Protection was radically changed and now is called Windows Resource Protection (since it protects more than files now).  The original issues were related to the way it worked previously, which was dumb and poorly thought out.  The new version simply prevents access to protected files rather than idiotically allowing access and then subsequently telling Winlogon to replace them.  There's no possible way you could encounter the same issue since the protection lives in the DACL instead of in Winlogon.

    Also, only TrustedInstaller can replace things protected by WRP, so your average virus author would have to create a Windows Installer package to pull anything off.  And as long as you have UAC enabled, you would remain immune to silent attacks barring some kind of bug.



  • @Lingerance said:

    @IMil said:
    @asuffield said:

    It's WFP. Due to an inexcusable bug in one of the APIs used by this fundamentally flawed misfeature, in order for WFP to be able to 'protect' certain files that can be placed in that directory when frontpage is installed, it has to force the directory to exist all the time, even when frontpage is not installed.

    I wouldn't call this a bug. The reason to monitor 'program files/xerox' folder is not clear to me; let's assume that Xerox screwed up and released drivers that sometimes hang up the OS. So, WFP has to replace the drivers in 'xerox' folder as soon as they appear.

    There are two options to do this:

    1) Monitor changes of the 'program files' folder, waiting for the 'xerox' folder to appear

    2) Create the 'xerox' folder and  monitor changes to it.

    Obviously, the first option would consume more resources; the only problem with the second is irritation of some 0.001% of users. The choice isn't hard to make.


    Alter the sys-calls that make directories and trigger whenever something starts with C:\Program Files\xerox would IMO be alot less CPU intensive and considering how fast other operations on MS usually are there wouldn't be much of a performance impact.

    Do you really think that would be better than to create the folder?


Log in to reply