Windows 7: Are the error messages getting worse?

Windows has always had a history of delivering spectacularly unhelpful error messages and actions. In particular, there's the standard dialog box that gives the options Abort, Retry and Ignore. There's no clear indication as to which each option does: does Abort stop what you're doing and every job after it or just the current action? Does ignore, ignore the current error and move on? Practically, it makes little difference as to what the buttons are supposed to do, as when you get an error message with these three options that only thing that you can be sure of is that pressing either of them will just cause the same dialog box to appear again.

Then, there's my favourite error message of all time: "Unknown has caused an error in unknown". How does Windows even know it's an error, then?

You'd think that win Windows 7, Microsoft would have gone some way towards making error messages and actions easier to understand and control. Sadly, that doesn't appear to be the case, as we found out when we installed the recent Release Candidate.

From the start Internet Explorer 8 decided that it wasn't going to play nicely with websites, which is a shame, as the one thing that you'd want Internet Explorer to be good at is viewing websites. At repeated intervals it would pop up an error message that said: "Internet Explorer encountered a validation error" with the options to Ignore once, Ignore always and Do not ignore.

For starters, the error message doesn't make any sense. What exactly is a validation error? Does ignoring the problem make it go away? What the hell does Do not ignore do? Does it cause Internet Explorer to crash in a horrible way, or does it look for the cause of the problem and fix it? Sadly, none of the above. Press any button here and the same dialog box just pops up a bit later.

Fortunately, in this case we found two ways round this problem. First, you can install Firefox, which doesn't cause any kind of validation error. Secondly, if you do want to use Internet Explorer 8 you can turn off Data Execution Prevention (DEP).

This feature is designed to spot malicious code running from a part of memory that's designated as non-executable. However, in this case it appears to also want to stop Internet Explorer from viewing websites, which is slightly less useful. Turning off DEP for just Internet Explorer didn't fix our problem, so we turned it off globally.

To do this, get up a Command Prompt in Administrator mode and type bcdedit /set {current} nx AlwaysOff. If you want to turn it back on later type: bcdedit /set {current} nx AlwaysOn. Both changes require a reboot.