
"If you move your mouse pointer continuously...  the query may not fail." - iamelgringo
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/168702
======
thorax
I can only imagine this is taking advantage of the fact that Windows task
scheduling gives higher priority to threads which are currently receiving user
interaction.

In certain cases, doing this would allow the process to handle returning data
faster, especially if it was having to communicate with Excel a great deal and
there was a lot of context-switching/waiting between the processes and you
wanted to favor Excel's processing of the returned data over a background task
with high CPU usage.

Perhaps the problem is that pieces of the Excel side were timing-out and
causing all the returned data to be lost.

To read more about UI thread boosting in Windows, this article is a pretty
good one: [http://www.sriramkrishnan.com/blog/2006/08/tale-of-two-
sched...](http://www.sriramkrishnan.com/blog/2006/08/tale-of-two-schedulers-
win_115489794858863433.html)

~~~
johns
I think your hunch is right
[http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/02/20/535440....](http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/02/20/535440.aspx)

~~~
statictype
I think that's the opposite scenario. In what you linked, what happens is, you
_hold_ the mouse down on the window which prevents it from refreshing, which
makes the actual task go faster (since its no longer trying to refresh the
progress bar)

~~~
johns
The actual task in Excel's case being running the query.

------
CUViper
Don't forget the warning at the top, "This information is preliminary and has
not been confirmed or tested by Microsoft."

So while it's funny to say, "haha, isn't this typical of stupid M$," they
apparently didn't produce this advice. More likely, some support tech recorded
the mouse bit from the customer just to be complete, and 7 years later it
still hasn't been verified...

------
pookleblinky
"NOTE: Depending on your query, it may take several minutes to return the
results of your query to the worksheet."

First thought: this has got to be a parody.

Second thought: Oh Cthulhu, it is for real.

Third thought: Just by mentioning this link almost anywhere, it'll be
excoriated as "just another baseless attack on Microsoft (which I, being a
technologically fair and balanced soul, will admit to having less than stellar
practices)"

~~~
Hexstream
Yeah. Flagged for newsworthlessness.

------
pookleblinky
I haven't used Windows in years.

Does anyone know if these [http://ishmeet.wordpress.com/2007/09/28/3-wicked-
microsoft-b...](http://ishmeet.wordpress.com/2007/09/28/3-wicked-microsoft-
bugs) still exist?

The =rand(200, 99) one looks interesting.

~~~
sounddust
You still can't name a file or folder "con" (even in Win7) because it's a
reserved word used for keyboard input on the command line. When Windows 9x was
popular, you could bluescreen any machine on a local network by trying to
access the share \\\machinename\con\con, which was great if you lived in a
dorm :)

~~~
CUViper
You can do it with Cygwin though, and Explorer will still have trouble dealing
with it after it's been created. You can also create files with a trailing
period or leading/trailing space, which usually isn't allowed.

------
sofal
I can verify that stuff like this works. I once wrote a Ruby script that
imported drawings into Visio from XML. It took a while as you sat there and
watched the boxes and lines move around and adjust themselves, but you could
speed it up by a factor of two just by grabbing and holding the scrollbar with
the mouse.

~~~
jibiki
*nix has /usr/bin/nice for running a program with high priority. Isn't there anything like that on windows?

~~~
sp332
Yeah, press ctrl-alt-esc to bring up the Task Manager. Go to the Processes
tab, then right-click on a process. Choose a priority form the Set Priority
submenu. Options are Realtime, High, Above Normal, Normal (default), Below
Normal, and Low.

~~~
pmjordan
Or, for something more automated, try the "start" command.

    
    
      help start
    

in the shell will tell you how to use it.

------
triplefox
A similar-looking symptom I've seen with IE6 is that links won't "take" if I
click and then move the cursor away. IE will display a message in the status
bar when I click, but for some reason it is noticeably less likely to actually
load the page if I don't keep the mouse on the link. This was particularly bad
on dialup.

------
iamelgringo
_Do not stop moving the mouse until all the data has been returned to
Microsoft Excel._

Priceless.

