"Fatal flaw" in Windows 7 raising eyebrows

Did I seriously jinx the launch of Windows 7?

Last month, when the highly-anticipated Windows 7 was released to manufacturing, I said "the odds of a delay impacting Windows 7's release date at this point are extremely slim."

But now, analysts are throwing up warnings that a major bug in Windows 7 has been revealed -- one so serious it could even delay the launch of the new OS.

The bug is a biggie, a "massive memory leak" contained in the CHKDSK utility, which is used to verify the consistency and integrity of hard drives. Apparently, if CHKDSK is run against a secondary hard drive with a certain setting turned on, it causes Windows to gobble up all available memory, slowing the computer to an unusable crawl and potentially, eventually crashing the machine. Independent testers have verified the problem under a variety of scenarios, noting even that if the CHKDSK operation is canceled, the problem continues to get worse until the machine is rebooted.

CHKDSK has been part of Windows as long as I can remember, so it comes as quite a surprise that it has suddenly become buggy. But that's always the danger with OS development; bugs tend to crop up in the least expected places.

Since Windows 7 has already been shipped to disk manufacturing -- and it will be available to some customers for download starting tomorrow -- it's really too late to do anything about the problem, unless Microsoft punches the big red "STOP" button and aborts the production of the software and goes through the RTM process from scratch. That would mean delays of weeks or even months.

Will that really happen? Almost certainly not. Microsoft has far too much riding on the launch of Windows 7 to let a single bug -- even a big one like this -- get in the way of that. Instead, the company will almost assuredly release a patch before the software is even released, and will simply hope that relatively few users are impacted by the problem before they can download the fix. Since the problem doesn't cause data loss, I doubt Microsoft takes the same "fatal" viewpoint that outsiders do. I mean, really, what Windows user hasn't long since become accustomed to the occasional OS crash while he's simply minding his own business?