SoylentNews

owl [soylentnews.org] writes:

Several years ago, a bug was filed automatically due to a spike in failures in the Start menu with a new crash profile. Investigation of this bug was rather complicated, because the crash was “impossible”.

Then again, a lot of failures seem to be “impossible”, but the fact that they’re happening proves that it’s possible, and you just have to do some sleuthing and adopt a more creative mindset to figure them out.

One of the tools for investigating these types of failures is seeing what other programs are running at the time, or what other programs crashed shortly before or after the failure occurred. In this case, whenever the crash occurred, there was one specific third-party program running. This program billed itself as a utility that boosts your system’s gaming performance by terminating all processes it deemed to be non-essential. Its advertising copy calls out useless “productivity apps” as one of those non-essential processes. (Yeah, how dare you let a computer be used for productivity? Can’t you see I’m playing a game?)

Apparently, what happens that when the program detects that you’re playing a game, it runs around and simply terminates all the non-essential processes.

Original Submission