Windows, take your kill switches, interrupts, reboots AND Registry: and stuff it

I'm at a big VoIP trade show that starts tomorrow. Come here and you'll get plenty of VoIP.
But right now, I am cranky. And when bloggers get cranky, ooh boy, better watch out.
Kill switches are NEVER, EVER OK.

My colleague David Berlind makes a very true and valid point that even the most benevolent instances of kill switches are PITAs, plain and simple. But I have some more thoughts to add.

Sometimes Windows makes computing a pain in the ass.

Some of the most vivid precipitors aren't kill switches, but are session interrupts.

An example of benevolent session interrupts would be Windoze Automatic Update.

One time, about a month ago, I left my PC on (along with about eight open applications and two instances of at least four) to, uh, go "down the hall." Five minutes later I see my XP machine booting back up after automatically installing an upgrade.

I'm not in the habit of manually saving all my files when I get up from my desk for a very short spell. And did I ever pay the price for not doing so. Even lost train of thought from a blog entry I just knew would have lit up Techmeme like the Christmas Tree at Rockefeller Center.

Microsoft needs to consider the PITA factor of all this. Plus I would also like it if the OS, and third-party downloadable programs, could be tweaked to install automatically in the registry rather than require a reboot.

I have a brand new Media Center PC but all those programs/instances take a long time to power down and back up. Five minutes, to and fro. Yea, yea, I could go to msconfig and clean up my start menu, but I like to have the programs I am going to use open at Start.

But when I do this, I know that I'm in for a hassle and I want to download a program that needs to insert itself in the Registry. As with other session interrupts, I am going to have to reboot.

Please, Microsoft and all Windows-compatible software developers: don't turn my machine off or make me do so to install your stuff!!