A story of gflags and the crashing Notepad

As you can imagine, being able to reproduce a problem on a machine you can put your hands on is the best thing to troubleshoot and resolve it, so as I guess almost all my colleagues in CSS I quite often install on one of my machines the test apps I got from customers, or make experiments to confirm/deny a theory I have… this is how this story begun. A while ago, on my Vista x64 machine notepad.exe started to intermittently fail to load and the only “visible” symptom (of course apart the fact that Notepad was not showing up) was a very quick command prompt but unfortunately the content was impossible to read, and I had nothing in the Event Log or any other “obvious” logs. I noticed this problem because the CRM tool we use to track our work on support cases, offer the possibility to review the entire log of a call in notepad, and every now and then I happen to use that function if I want to have a quick recap of what has been done so far, specially if I got the case from another Engineer and I’m not fully aware of all the…

I started to use this tool almost 6 years ago, in my previous life before Microsoft because it was quite widely used in my former Company; at the beginning I didn’t like it very much, I was used to Windows Explorer and at that time the Salamander’s capabilities where not as refined as they are in the current version. But since I’m quite curious I decided to for with it for a while as an experiment, and guess what? I’ve never returned back from that experiment and to Windows Explorer 😊. As the time and releases went by, new features where added (and still more are being developed), the user interface refined and performance and reliability improved… So, what I like most of this tool? Well, quite a few things, actually… I’m a keyboard shortcut addict, and almost anything you can do with the Salamander has a shortcut key (and this is probably it main strength, in my opinion) The two resizable panels have easily customizable views (Brief, Detailed, Icons, Thumbnails etc…) You can browse your File System, your System Registry, open and navigate archives (like .zip, .rar etc…), ISO files and more inside the panels, like if you are still…