Gavin,

> Certainly NT is much better in many areas than 95, but when it comes down
>  to whether it is fundamentally more robust and stable when used in a
>  real-life developer workstation environment, I'm not sure it's really any
>  better than 95 was.  Install programs still vomit files all over the disk,
>  happily replacing whatever critical shared DLL files that they feel like,
>  and none of NT's security or kernel features seem to be used to prevent
>  applications from doing whatever their developers felt like to your system.

You and I have profoundly agreed about such subjects in the past. I hope you
noticed when you installed QCTerm that we put all the DLLs we needed into our
own directory, where they're sought out first, not in a common Windows
directory. We replace no DLLs -- and nobody should replace our versions of the
DLLs -- nor do we modify any INI-type files. The only modification we had to
make to the system was the installation of the fonts. Other than having to
delete the fonts (which is not a completely necessary step), deinstallation of
QCTerm is merely the deletion of the AICS folder.

But this is the best we can do on Windows. If we had the opportunity to
compile in the DLLs and the fonts into QCTerm, I'd do that, like RLs on the
HP3000. This is less efficient on a very small machine, but disc is extremely
cheap now, and these small DLLs don't take up a great deal of space under any
circumstance. I want software on both the HP3000 and the PC that just drops
onto the system, has virtually no dependencies (other than system instrinsics
or APIs) and can be purged with the same ease that it was installed.

Doing this not only makes the world safe for us -- but for everyone else too.
It is all of these cross-linked dependencies and uncontrolled memory leaks
that are making both PCs (and Macs) so unstable nowadays.

Wirt