George,

One other consideration I would add to your list.

Visibility - Is it obvious it's a bug?

I started Word 97 immediately after its release and it was a nightmare.

Some bugs were easy to find. For example, calling the PrintOut method from VFP would always generate a GPF. It was obviously a bug - and MS Tech Support confirmed it was an "issue" when I called - and I found a workaround that worked better for me than the alternative MS posted in the Knowledge Base.

Some bugs were very difficult to find. When automating a mail merge letter from VFP 5.0 and the first release of Word 97, if the result of the mail merge is a letter that is exactly one full page in length - meaning the bottom of the last line of text is printed at the vertical height of the page - and you print the document, then Word prints two pages, the first one is as expected, the second one only includes the generic header and footer and nothing else in between. Furthermore, saving the document only saved the second page which is essentially nothing. I noticed it when my client reprinted all letters pertaining to a case that was going to court and they got no text for one specific letter. The client then performed a lot of tests and they were able to determine the exact circumstances under which this would happen. I wrote a fairly simple workaround. This this bug could have potentially cost us millions of dollars if it was not discovered by accident on a fairly minor case.

I don't like these very subtle bugs because it takes a lot of time to determine exactly what is happening. I much rather have the application GPF as it did for PrintOut because thn it's clear there is a problem.

Daniel