PC Pest Control

For Karl Kasca, it was the upgrade from hell. Kasca, an information researcher in Pasadena, California, thought installing a critical update to Windows 98 would solve a few annoying problems he'd experienced in Word and Outlook. Instead, bugs within the update caused countless new problems. For starters, during the installation process, the Office 2000 update began spitting out error messages. To get rid of them, Kasca followed the complex instructions in a Knowledge Base article, but he still couldn't open Word. Then after 3 hours on the phone with Microsoft tech support, Kasca finally got his PC working again. "By then we had mutual empathy like prisoners of war and their captors," he recalls.

Kasca still had to face repeated reinstallations of Office 2000, multiple rounds of editing Windows Registry settings, and endless reboots. But those efforts were just the beginning. (Don't get him started on the Outlook glitch.) "It took almost a day to get the problems sorted out, and even then things weren't working perfectly," says Kasca. "I'm the sole proprietor of my business, and any time I spend figuring out PC problems is time that I lose on work for clients."

The Bug Blues

Kasca's experience, we're sad to say, is all too common. And we won't see an end to the bug problem anytime soon. For one thing, at PC World we continue to receive tons of complaints from you, day after day, about all kinds of computing snarls. (Keep those e-mail missives coming.) It's clear to us that traditional bugs within programs--say, where your financial app makes wacky calculations--still happen. (See last month's Bugs and Fixes for details about snafus in Microsoft Money 2001.)

You also have to factor in all the new things a PC is expected to do, along with the various devices we now hook up to it--a recipe for incompatibility headaches. Yet other problems are due to our being so tightly wired to the Web. Not only is our universe rampant with as many bad bugs as before, but the scope of the troubles is widening. Holes appear that can allow hackers to access your system remotely and run riot.

To find out why today's software is still so buggy, we talked to companies like Corel, Lotus, Microsoft, Network Associates, and Symantec. These companies feel, first of all, that the computing world is more complex than ever. They argue that they can't possibly predict every single hardware and software incompatibility or test how users will put their machines through their paces. In addition, some of them insist that problems happen partly because of consumers' lust for new and better features.

Software developers claim that the latest programming tools enable programmers to write considerably higher quality, cleaner code. And Microsoft feels that the buggy software situation is improving--although Scott Culp, security program manager at Microsoft's Security Response Center, adds this caution: "You've got systems getting more and more complex at the same time that the tools and testing are getting better."

Certainly, today's programs provide many more features than before and allow us to do more stuff. For instance, most e-mail apps let you send a newsletter as an HTML page rather than as plain text. But do greater capabilities mean more bugs? Experts believe there are fewer bugs per line of code now than in the past. But there are many more lines of code, too, increasing the total number of bugs.

Par for the Course

At the other end of the spectrum, some advocates for users believe we've become too complacent; we simply expect bugs to show up as a matter of course. According to Steve Gibson, security pundit and founder of Gibson Research, bugs should not exist in properly designed and tested software. "If the handle of your car came off, you'd be really upset, because [the defect is] inexcusable; but very similar, nonlethal things happen on your computer all the time, and you take it for granted," Gibson argues. "There's this responsibility put on the user [for problems] that aren't the user's fault."

At the technical level, Richard M. Smith, chief technology officer for the Denver-based Privacy Foundation, believes that many of the current problems users encounter have to do with drivers for USB devices--pieces of code that control devices like your scanner or DSL modem, for instance. These drivers usually come from the hardware manufacturer. "The quality control on many of these drivers is awful," Smith adds.