Software
Days of Winrot and OS what-not
There's no doubt that Winrot is one of the greatest IT productivity sinkholes. In case you aren't familiar with the term, Winrot is the creeping, pernicious degradation of the integrity of Windows systems to the point where they run slowly, behave erratically, stop working altogether or all of the above.
The most common cause of Winrot appears to be DLL hell, the popular name for the infernal mess that comes with the cumulative updates and replacements of Dynamic Link Libraries. These changes result in incompatibilities, errors in the Windows registry, and other more mysterious and usually unresolvable issues.
The solution to Winrot is not to clean the registry, find the broken and mismatched DLLs, and remove the accumulated cruft of odd files that Windows, Internet Explorer and sundry programs strew throughout the file system with the wild abandon of cherry trees scattering their spring blossoms at the bidding of the zephyrs of spring (we've had too many late nights, so what?).
Nope, the answer to serious Winrot is drastic and time-consuming. You have to wipe the affected machine and start again. From scratch. Reinstall Windows and then however many updates and patches need to be applied, which will entail more reboots than the mind can comfortably encompass, followed by reinstalling all the applications.
Now if you were sensible, you would have a cloned image of the original Windows installation, but of course you'd still have to do the upgrades. You'd also have another image of the installation with all of your core applications. But it still is going to be death by upgrades. And you still have to re-create all of the application settings. There is no easy way around any of this.
Our main desktop has Winrot so extensively that among its many new and interesting behaviors, it can easily take 60 seconds for a Word document that is being sent as an e-mail attachment using Word's "Send to" command under the file menu to appear as an e-mail message under Outlook, even when Outlook is running.
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