28-08-2026 15:34 via theregister.com

Word 97's ghost in the machine: The crash that vanished the moment anyone looked at it

Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen shared another fireside tale – one to strike fear into the hearts of engineers everywhere: the bug that can't be replicated in the debugger. The story begins near the end of the Word 97 release cycle, when a defect surfaced in the test labs but vanished the moment engineers reached for a debugger. It was maddening. A script could trigger the crash fairly reliably, yet the instant anyone tried to hunt it down, the bug ducked out of sight. Chen recalle
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