A message to application programmers
Your program is not the most important program in the world. It's not the most important program on my computer. It's probably not even in my top 10. Maybe at best I run it once a month. More likely I ran it once because I needed something to do that task and I'll get round to uninstalling it in due course. Please therefore
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When I deal with users who don't know what they're doing I often say "You have lots of updates to do" a common response is "Oh, yes, it's always asking for them, I ignore it." Sometimes I say "There are a lot of icons on this screen" or "wow, you have a lot of taskbars" and a common response is "It's very annoying but I don't know how to get rid of them". Sometimes I get "Hey my computer is really slow to start up" and the task bar looks like a bloody christmas tree from TSR programs. So I think a lot of these issues are biting newbie users hard but they don't know what to do about it and they don't know how to deal with it.
It may be I have an out of date idea of their incompetence style -- this is a fair criticism. I would have no objection to, on first install "add icon to desktop option" with that box auto checked so if the user just clicks "next" or "go" or "simple install" it does that. I have a big objection to "add icon to desktop" as an automatic assumption that comes back every time I do an update (step forward adobe acrobat for one -- that icon is like a whack a mole). I'm not sure which other things I mention would be helpful for novice users. I don't think novice users want programs which "pretend" to close down but do not (indeed if you google "shut down skype" you can find a lot of clueless people trying to work out how to quit skype). I don't think novice users want spurious toolbars automatically installed. It may be that novice users want a default icon on the desktop (no objections from me there). I definitely don't think novice users want multiple "Update" messages from every different bit of software (because novice users have NEVER updated all their software).
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Heh... Obviously I know what you mean, but I don't think most people have had TSR programs for about 15 years. The fun of trying to work out the best combination of TSRs to load high so you could get a few more kilobytes for the game you wanted to run sadly disappeared with Windows 95. These days the things don't terminate and stay resident, they just lurk in the background, still running...
(Bit of a delayed reply, but I just came back to this post...)
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I don't know what the proper word actually is these days. In unix a daemon process. In Windows (which I was really thinking of) I don't know.
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