Sort of like "stupid things you see people post," but for tech stuff that you run across. Or whatever. Today I learned that a Windows 7 upgrade will fail if there is an ampersand in the username on the computer. Great coders you got there, Microsoft! http://social.technet.microsoft.com...l/thread/387cafff-5e0b-4e7f-83f1-a8de86ae3729
Yes. Ampersands are supported in usernames, except when upgrading from Vista to Windows 7 and suddenly Microsoft never tested that situation.
That's definitely a bad experience. I'm shocked it lets you have an ampersand in the first place. Can you create new Win7 accounts with one?
I'll try and find out! The workaround is merely to create a new admin account without the & and install it via that. I'm curious to see what's gonna happen to the ampersand name once the Win7 upgrade is finished if in fact it's unsupported in Win7.
A related bug is how a lot of programs will freak out if you have a dot in your username. Which my workplace has.
I wonder how much of that is bad input handling in legacy code from the wild cowboy-hacking days of yore before we had things like best practices, and how much of it is from college-trained coders who really ought to know better. I suspect the answer is depressing.
Well, I can confirm that the solution of creating a dummy user and proceeding with the install works as a workaround, and in addition, the username with an ampersand works fine after the upgrade process completes. Thanks Microsoft for a bug that was completely undocumented and failed to return a bug that was searchable!
I had a similar problem the last time I had Comcast come and install service - their stupid software didn't like my account username because it had a space in it. The installer ended up having to call in to finish the modem provisioning.
It's worse than that. Their bullshit account system won't even let you have a password with a space in it.
My personal favourite is when you run into password reset systems that let you set passwords not supported by the client. Or when the client and web interface support different character types.
