>>Remember the original question was about hardware & software: is your help desk doing all maintenance for 2000 windows PCS? That, in of itself, would require a significant help desk even if they were only running solitaire on their computers!
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>Hey Jamie, ever thought of all these guys buying new hardware incl. new OS and try your app on it ? They even buy stuff with ME on it, and there you go. Pfff hard labour, and for us this isn't really paid for (while it should); the hardware guy of course doesn't know the solution to a Too many files problem. Can he help it ? can the user really help it ? Well ...

A help desk is supposed to provide a single point where the customer can get their problems answered. The user does not care at all whether it's your fault or the network administrator's fault. He/She doesn't care whether you got paid for it or not (Though I do! Find a way to make the b's pay <g>!) They just want their problem solved. Given the single point strategy, the question is what can we do to make the help desk work more effectively. In a big complicated computing environment the help desk will pass the question to the people who can answer the problem.

Too many files is a perfect example because it appears as a bug in your application when in fact it's a failure by the installation/maintenance/network Admin types. A basic support guy who does hardware, installations, network problems and the like will have no chance to solve that one unless they are God or capable of reading your installation instructions. While, any one of your developers can solve that question in seconds. The help desk should have this in it's problem database, because it came up before for sure, and should also be able to solve it in seconds. So what would happen in a perfect world would be that the help desk person finds the too many files in use, sees the note and passes it to the maintenance guy who fixes the config. Your developer should not have to see it.

My point about the 2000 Windows PCs is that some other mechanism than your help desk is providing support for the two thousand users. Maybe support is being provided by your client's help desk? Maybe there is no help desk at all and support is provided by "experienced users", a very common situation in the old days when every department had it's computer Guru? Maybe they just live with the fact that nothing works? (I believe a lot of people do that, that's why Y2K was a bust as far as catastrophes go.) Who do they call when they can't print from their PC? Not the software developer, I hope. Though come to think of it I usually try to circumvent the government Help Desks and contact the contractor that is responsible for developing the software because, well, I do read the manual and it seems the typical help desk doesn't.

This brings up a last piece of advice: remember that Help Desk people are young, inexperienced and frequently not technically sharp. They will only lsat at the job for two months maximum because they don't like being yelled at.