Did you guys never work helpdesk?
Laura, here it is in English.
You know how when you go into Microsoft Word you can set it to back up what you're working on every ten minutes, just in case it crashes? (You do know that, right?) And you can set it to correct common typos as you go, or instead wait until you run a spellcheck.
And in Outlook, you can set it to do the typo thing, or to automatically spellcheck before you send anything.
The way it used to work was that each program saved these settings to its own place. So wherever Word was installed, there would be a file that had all those settings. Usually called 'config.ini' or 'word.ini' or something like that. ('ini' for "initialization") You could read the file in Notepad, if you wanted to, and see what your settings were. You could even change the settings directly in that file, if you were a geek (or an idiot). And if you completely broke the Word config file, the only thing that was broken was Word. And you could usually fix it by just deleting the file and everything would go back to the default settings.
Well, someone had the bright idea to put all of these settings into a big database. That way Outlook would know that when you're in Word you like to spellcheck as you go. He probably had a Powerpoint presentation with a contrived example of why Outlook would ever need to know this.
The first problem with this idea is that, even when everything is going right, you can't just read the file. Second is that the Word settings are all mixed up with the Outlook settings, and there's really no way to know for sure which program wrote which setting.
The bigger problem, though, is what happens when it breaks. Everything breaks. It's a single file that nothing on your computer (or almost nothing) will work if it's messed up, and everything on your computer needs to be able to modify it. It's like putting all the electricity in your house onto one line, then don't put a fuse or breaker on it.
Yes, Windows is that stupid. And it has been since '95. It's why Andrew can afford to buy 10 every fish sold in L.A.
