Tech Shakedown #10: Windows Media Player's error dialog road to nowhere

Today, I would have posted one of my video "reviewcasts" for you, but we ran into a production snafu. Here at ZDNet, our process for posting those involves me reviewing the audio before we finish off the post production. Sometimes, there's material that's worth cutting in the interests of your time (we don't want to keep you longer than need be). But today, when I attempted to open the audio file of the nearly finished reviewcast (a WAV file that was on a USB key), I got a really strange error message from Windows Media Player that I can't imagine anybody ever making sense of.

Thankfully, these are the days of the Internet and software developers like Microsoft can contextually link these error dialogs to their Web sites so as to provide end users some idea of how to overcome whatever problem faces them. But, as you'll see in this technology shakedown, even though the dialog had one of those links, it didn't get me very far.