QUOTE (Fleet Command @ Sep 14 2009, 06:21 AM)

Basically, proper notification is a must in a program. When an application is unable to accomplish a certain task, I believe it owes its user a proper notice.
I fully agree.
Unfortunately the best we can hope for is that the application may tell us of its own errors.
The application may be unaware of a Windows error which fails to append new data to an existing file, and instead replaces all previous data with the new data.
I recently removed an old version of a Firewall, via the official Add/Remove mechanism,
supplemented by a *.BAT script from a user forum to take care of residual registry keys etc.
The script ran and finally reported success.
Fortunately I launched a command prompt and invoked the script on the command line,
and could see many DOS commands and responses above the "success".
and saw that REG.EXE had been told to delete many keys, and a few were reported as "no access".
This was a permissions error not anticipated by the writer of the script, and I had to manually intervene.
I would have been happy if the removal script had detected the problem,
and finished by reporting partial success ( and possibly the keys that were stuck)
but that might have taken an extra 2 or 3 lines of error detection/reporting could for each line of REG.EXE.
Two years ago I removed a much earlier version of the firewall, after which the later version said the old version was still installed and it could not update. At that time there was no user forum script, only the official Add/Remove mechanism. After a little effort I found the firewall's principle registry key and about 2000 sub-keys were accessible but could NOT be removed, and the remotest ends of the registry tree had a few non-accessible items.
RegEdit was useless, and I had to download something far superior to solve the problem.
After more than 30 years designing real-time computer systems that never had a BSOD my standards are too high for Windows.
I like to do things right. My son works in I.T. and tells me to "get a life" ! ! !
Alan