First, do not suck

Have to get this rant off my chest: I am so sick of software sucking. Today was an extreme example, but every day I use computers there's several examples of self-imposed software stupidity driving up the blood pressure.

So I propose a new maxim for software designers based on a maxim from medicine, "First, do no harm":

• First, do not suck

So: do not tell me one thing is wrong when in fact something totally other is. Do not randomly do stupid things that I can't stop you doing. Do not assume anything that I can't correct you about.

The highlights of the random screwups so far for today:

• Both my monitors randomly refresh occasionally, setting icons blinking, windows flashing
  
• Saving a file in Acrobat sometimes burns 100% CPU for no apparent reason. Cursor still blinks in Save As dialog, but dialog is dead. Comes back after about a minute
• Acrobat informed me that the disk for temporary storage was full (a mere 5GB free), when in fact the file name was too long.
• Java app using XML parser works on one PC with JDK 1.4.2 but fails to find SAX parser on identical machine with identical JDK.
• Letters take half a second to appears when typing a filename into the Save As dialog when pointing to a network drive (presumably due to the dialog trying to auto-complete the name)
• Open an image by double clicking. Try to compare it with another image by double-clicking - replaces first image. No apparent way to turn this off.
• Text an Excel spreadsheet that was displaying fine suddenly turns into a bunch of "######"'s. Checked that format of cell was "Text". Only by changing format to "General" did I manage to fix it
• Word pops up irritating panel whenever I copy more than one piece of text - take a few minutes to work out how to blow that away. It then insists on selecting whole paragraph randomly when I want to select a piece. Wade through checkboxes in options to turn that off
• While editing this post, discover that Ctrl+S publishes - I was trying for Ctrl-A to select all. Why do I need a shortcut for publishing? It's hardly something I do every few minutes.
• An endless number of apparently temporary user account profiles are appearing in my "Documents and Settings" folder. They're using several gigabytes of disk, but can't be deleted because something is using the files. No idea what that something is though.