[Throwaway90283]

I think my favorite is the bug where you could delete any folder from a user's computer, just by linking them to a site with a few lines of code inserted in the source. I think it was on XP, and it would trigger Windows help to open at the same time.

[euyyn]

Yeah, you'd trigger a very specific help:// URL that happened to accept as a query parameter the path to a folder. That folder was created by the help page, which would put some temporary stuff in there and, when the user closed the help window, would remove the folder and its contents (because you have to clean after yourself!). The obvious thought is... "what if I point it to a folder that already exists?"

Yep.

It was definitely there before XP, at least since 2002.

[przemoc]

XP was RTMed on August 24, 2001 and GA was October 25, 2001.

But I can understand why you wrote what you wrote. Early XP experience for many remains repressed memory, because it was quite buggy (be it OS itself or drivers delivered with it, BSODs were a norm), far from stable 2000 SP4, which I kept using for a long time. XP around SP2 (August 25, 2004) got usable.

[yuhong]

AFAIK it was fixed in XP SP1 and after user backlash they also released a patch for RTM.