Here are examples of mostly non-security related bugs in Microsoft software. Many are absurdly simple and should have been fixed soon after discovery. Others are so critical that the affected application or operating system should not have been released for production use. Some also prove a lack of scalability. These systems were released without sufficient testing or without regard to the consequences on users.

Microsoft® Windows™ 2000

• Fixed in Service Pack 4, June 2003 - all of these bugs were introduced with the initial release in February, 2000, or subsequent bug fixes. Most of these bugs have been in production use for 3+ years.
  • When a message with a corrupted time stamp is received by your server, the SMTP service may stop responding or shut down unexpectedly. Insufficient data verification is performed. (330716)
  • You may experience both of the following symptoms on a Microsoft Exchange 2000 server that is running on Windows 2000 Server or Windows 2000 Advanced Server: (1) The IIS Admin Service stops. When you restart it, it immediately stops again. (2) The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) service and the Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP) service repeatedly stop and restart. This problem may occur if the Exchange server receives a corrupted message that contains a recipient size that is not valid. Again, this is insufficient data verification. (331509)
  • WM_TIMER timer messages may stop being delivered to programs. This may cause portions of programs to stop working. For example, if a program updates a window when it receives a WM_TIMER message, this window updating stops. (322913)
  • MS02-055: Unchecked Buffer in Windows Help Facility May Allow Attacker to Run Code. An attacker can exploit the help system. (323255)
  • Drive Letter Changes After You Restart Your Computer (325040)
  • When you remove a USB hub from your computer, you may receive a "STOP 0x0000001E" error message. (328036)
  • You may receive a "Stop 0x1E" error message intermittently due to a bug in NTFS. It would seem the file system was not thoroughly tested, or random file system hangs aren't considered critical enough to fix quickly. (329801)
  • You may experience one or more of the following symptoms intermittently when you use a third-party program that loads performance-monitoring extension dynamic link library (DLL) files on your Windows 2000-based or Windows XP-based computer:
    • Memory leaks
    • Slow performance or a program stops responding
    • Persistent event logging
    • Program unresponsiveness or crashes
    (330259)
  • The Computer Appears to Stop Responding When a Program Sends Large Blocks of Data Through TCP/IP Sockets. This exemplifies scalability issues. (810058)
  • When you rename a file on a remote Windows 2000-based file server, the file server may stop responding (hang). (810340)
  • Your Windows 2000-based computer may intermittently stop responding (hang) during periods of high disk activity. When this occurs, you can use the mouse and keyboard. However, any action that requires disk access may be blocked. You must restart the computer to return it to normal activity. This is another example of simple scalability problems. (810425)
  • "Stop 0x00000051 REGISTRY_ERROR" Error Message When You Log On. No reason given is provided. (810558)
  • When you try to install driver updates from the Microsoft Windows Update Web site, the installation may not succeed. (814033)
  • You may receive an "0x0000001E" error message on a blue screen. This error message is caused by Disk.sys. This is another random disk system failure. (331102)
  • CPU utilization in Services.exe may intermittently reach 100 percent on your Windows 2000-based computer, and the computer may stop responding (hang). When this occurs, users who are connected to the computer (if it is a file server or domain controller) are disconnected. You may also have to restart your computer. This symptom occurs if Esent.dll incorrectly processes the way that files are flushed to disk. (328885)
  • If you call the LoadLibrary function with a file name that does not have a .dll extension, and if there is a period (.) in the path, LoadLibrary may not find the file that you specified. This problem occurs because LoadLibrary does not parse the path correctly. This is a very heavily used Win32 API call. (324673)
  • "STOP 0x0000001E" Error Message in Tcipip.sys When Server Is Under a Heavy Network Load. This is another scalability issue. (812707)
• The mouse pointer will move randomly on its own in one direction, typically west or south. This simply annoying bug has existed for over 3 years.
• When syncing the Palm Handheld for the first time through USB port, Windows will try to install USB drivers. It may or may not prompt you for drivers. If Windows installs the default USB driver that comes with the OS, chances are you will get the Blue Screen Of Death. Tested this on more than one machine.
• If PCAnywhere is running and is connected as a client to another computer, apps with custom title-bar buttons (minimize, maximize, and close), display those buttons incorrectly. Trillian, for example, shows empty boxes in their place.
• Opening a command prompt as a user other than the one logged in will cause the cursor to disappear during launch.

Microsoft® Internet Explorer

• Viewing an HTML page containing just the following will crash every version of Internet Explorer and Outlook. There is no fix as of May 2, 2003.

  <html>
  <form>
  <input type crash>
  </form>
  </html>

• HTTP bug in Internet Explorer 6. It will determine a file's type by its extension, even though the protocol's standard requires it to be based on the type string sent from the server.
• PNG graphics will not render a transparent background correctly. All transparent backgrounds are filled with black.

Microsoft® Word 2002 (XP)

• Scrolling through documents containing embedded images will not display images correctly if using the scroll bar itself. Using the arrows at either end of the scroll bar does not cause this problem.
• The revision toolbar reappears upon some future loading of Word after it’s been turned off by the user. This includes documents for which “track changes” has not been turned on.

Microsoft® Excel 2002 (XP)

• When a spreadsheet is already open on Windows 2000 and another spreadsheet is chosen in the Start menu’s Documents (i.e. recent documents) menu, sometimes Excel will regain focus but will not open the document. The hard drive operates but no error message appears. The problem occurs in only certain situations.
• If multiple ranges of cells are highlighted and copied to the clipboard, unhighlighted cells in between the ranges are copied to the clipboard as well. For example, if A1 is selected along with A3 to A5 and copied to the clipboard, pasting into a text document (notepad) will cause A1 through A5 to be pasted. The paste occurs correctly within Excel.

Microsoft® Outlook® 2002 (XP)

• Viewing HTML e-mails setting font larger or smaller does not work. HTML e-mails sent from other Outlook users within the corporate intranet via Exchange can not have their fonts resized by the reader. I'm guessing this is due to a fixed font size being set in the HTML rather than the preferred CSS standard of setting proportional size.
• E-mails containing tables (possibly embedded Excel spreadsheets also) can not be fully viewed. If the table is wider than the window, no horizontal scroll bar appears. Moving to the right using the keyboard (cursor) does not move the view either. The cursor becomes “hidden” beyond the window’s view.
• When you choose to disable Windows Messenger to start and disable run in background, Outlook XP becomes very slow.

Microsoft® Outlook® 98

• Using a Personal Folder File (.pst) from a network drive corrupts the file.
• Saving an e-mail message leaves the file “in use” according to Windows even if the message is not open or being viewed.

Microsoft® Access 2002 (XP)

• “With” statement does not work in a VBA module. Being VBA, this could affect all of Office XP. This was found while attempting the following:

      With CurrentDB.TableDefs("xxx")
          For I=0 to .Fields.Count – 1
          ...
          Next
      End With

• Upgrading an MDB from Access 97 causes permissions to current tables and queries to change to read-only. Even if admin is the only user, read-write permissions must be reassigned to every object.

Microsoft® Access 97

• Use of some keywords in VBA may fail. Example: Name a function Substitute, in one set of calls it may work, in another it may not. Substitute is not a recognized function in the libraries referenced by default in a code module, and therefore should be available for use. It should also consistently fail or consistently work, but it’s unpredictable.

Copyright © 2004-2007 Matthew Schwartz