Jon -

A sore point with me, and a somewhat weak point with the RTFM rule, is that Microsoft publishes the worst possible user information. (Of course that's just a personal opinion, and I'm overstating it because I have seen some incredibly bad ones even compared to Mickey's.)

My idea of a useful instruction is that when you see a "command" on the screen that you can click to "do something," there should be an entry in Help that tells you what's going to happen if you click it. So far as I've been able to find, entering any "word" that appears on any screen in any Windows version (going back to Windows 1.1) as a Help search term results in "no results found for xxxxx."

See the bizarre and complex instructions for just listing the DOS commands in WinXP. You CAN'T FIND THEM by just putting DOS or COMMAND into a Help search, and they're NOT INCLUDED in any elementary or advanced Microsoft textbook I've seen. The ones I gave directions to in fact are not in Help, they're in the:

"... introduction to your new and wonderful system where we'd like to escort you on a slide show tour to show why you should just trust us and admit you're an idiot who would likely just ask a bunch of stupid questions if we really told you what we sold you.

(But they're NOT INCLUDED IN THE TOUR. They're just packaged with it, separate from the rest of the Help files.)

I don't really see any purpose in including a batch file to simulate an obsolete function. Bloat is bad enough without it. And giving out "standard batch files" is really pretty hazardous, since people who don't understand them can screw with them, and people who do will probably write their own if they can see what's in one you provide.

I don't recall whether DELTREE allowed any switches, but if it did a general purpose .bat would have to pass any legal ones, so even a .bat that was a real "substitute" instead of just a dangerous crutch would likely be as complex (and as large) as the compiled routine that was removed. If DELTREE served a useful purpose, it should have been left in. It didn't, so it was removed.

John