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MPEGs cause Vista’s Explorer to crash

Sunday, 2 September 2007 crash rant windows

Video: watch a simple download crash explorer over and over again. This really reminds me how feeble the underlying systems are in Windows.

Recently I enabled large icons on my desktop. The idea being that if I get too much junk, I have to clean up and therefore am forced to keep things clean. It seems to be working okay for now but I did run into this issue today:

I downloaded a MPEG. Not a fancy one… One straight out of the 90s and you really wouldn’t believe the firework display Windows put on for me. Because you wouldn’t believe it, I recorded it =)

I’ve been fairly optimistic about Vista. I’ve been using it since late last year and I’m fairly happy with it. That said, Microsoft have mucked up plenty of things. The problem causing my crash here could be with codecs or Firefox but why the hell is a thumbnail allowed to crash Explorer in the first place?

Where Unix systems have a fairly logical set of memory protections stopping programs interfere with each other, Windows seems to opt for utter chaos, allowing anything running to topple everything else.

This is by no means a deal-breaker for me and I don’t really think it should be for you. How often do you download MPEGs these days? This might not even be for all MPEGs — I couldn’t find another to test it — but my point over Windows allowing a video file to nuke it’s core user-interface component remains.

Oh and it stopped crashing as soon as it finished downloading. And that was nice.

Oh yeah. Why does Windows look for a solution every time it crashes? Why doesn’t it understand yet? There are no solutions on this operating system. And why the hell it can’t do that in the background and reload the program straight away is beyond me.