I haven't had any real problems yet with Firefox. Then again, I've still got 3.0.1 here. It sounds like there's a chance I should wait until 3.0.4 before updating again. (Despite its problems, IE is my primary browser anyway, mainly due to habit.)
The thing is, "end task/application" and "end process" are not really synonyms. An application can sometimes consist of more than one process, each process usually consisting of multiple threads for some reason. It's up to the application to terminate all the threads when it exits (or gets killed), but if something goes wrong, some threads might get stuck, meaning one process won't exit when the rest of the application (including its UI) does. Windows doesn't always detect this condition, thus a program can vanish from the "Applications" list and still remain in "Processes".
(In fact, I just had something like this happen yesterday when I installed Diablo II and somehow wound up with an extra "iexplore.exe" process in memory. It wasn't really doing anything but I killed it anyway.)
(Incidentally, I believe multithreading is one of the world's most abused coding practices. It's almost always used, and almost never necessary!)
As for the "Error Reporting" feature, it's really only useful if the same error gets reported enough times (by enough different people) for Microsoft to say "We better investigate this." That has happened, though. There have been a few times when I've hit the "Send Error Report" button, and then been directed to a web site with more information, usually including a link to an update for the crashing program. (Or to Microsoft Update in one case when Word crashed!)
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2008-10-11 05:19 am (UTC)The thing is, "end task/application" and "end process" are not really synonyms. An application can sometimes consist of more than one process, each process usually consisting of multiple threads for some reason. It's up to the application to terminate all the threads when it exits (or gets killed), but if something goes wrong, some threads might get stuck, meaning one process won't exit when the rest of the application (including its UI) does. Windows doesn't always detect this condition, thus a program can vanish from the "Applications" list and still remain in "Processes".
(In fact, I just had something like this happen yesterday when I installed Diablo II and somehow wound up with an extra "iexplore.exe" process in memory. It wasn't really doing anything but I killed it anyway.)
(Incidentally, I believe multithreading is one of the world's most abused coding practices. It's almost always used, and almost never necessary!)
As for the "Error Reporting" feature, it's really only useful if the same error gets reported enough times (by enough different people) for Microsoft to say "We better investigate this." That has happened, though. There have been a few times when I've hit the "Send Error Report" button, and then been directed to a web site with more information, usually including a link to an update for the crashing program. (Or to Microsoft Update in one case when Word crashed!)