Word 97's ghost in the machine: The crash that vanished the moment anyone looked at it
- ID
- 19069
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 28 Aug 2026, 9:34 PM
- Fetched
- 28 Aug 2026, 10:41 PM
- Provider
- The Register
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/08/28/word-97s-ghost-in-the-machine-the-crash-that-vanished-the-moment-anyone-looked-at-it/5293263
- Source URL
- https://www.theregister.com/headlines.atom
Summary
- Score
- 3.5
- Created
- 28 Aug 2026, 10:41 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developers
What happened
Raymond Chen recounts a Word 97-era crash that vanished under any debugger, traced ultimately to a CPU erratum on a specific manufacturer's chip. With the compiler toolset already locked and a new compiler too risky, the team binary-patched the shipping executable to insert a single NOP instruction into the offending code sequence.
Why it matters
This is a war story, not actionable guidance. The only practical takeaway is a reminder that heisenbugs can stem from hardware errata rather than your code, and that binary patching a locked binary is a legitimate last-resort option when changing the toolchain is riskier than editing bytes.
Discussion angle
When have you shipped a workaround for a bug you couldn't fully root-cause, and how did you weigh that against the risk of changing tooling near release?