Word 97's ghost in the machine: The crash that vanished the moment anyone looked at it
Microsoft veteran recalls how a CPU errata, a mythical ICE, and a single sneaky NOP saved Clippy's big debut
Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen shared another fireside tale – one to strike fear into the hearts of engineers everywhere: the bug that can't be replicated in the debugger.
The story begins near the end of the Word 97 release cycle, when a defect surfaced in the test labs but vanished the moment engineers reached for a debugger.
It was maddening. A script could trigger the crash fairly reliably, yet the instant anyone tried to hunt it down, the bug ducked out of sight.
Chen recalled: "The development team was very anxious, because a bug that appears only sporadically in the lab is going to occur regularly in the wild. But how do you debug a problem that resists debugging?"
It is every developer's nightmare, even for those smug types who...
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