Windows and Office are devolving at a fantastic rate. Just this morning I spent several minutes fighting with Windows 10 and it’s inability to deal with a drive mapping that was disconnected. it just sat there, locking up all of explorer, until i hard reset the machine. I could have logged into the VPN, allowing Windows to find it’s network drives, but i needed files from MY NAS, and as such, could not login to the VPN. this created a horrible race situation in Windows. I remember Win2k, WinXP and Win7 failing much more gracefully in this situation, but Windows 10 just sits there, broken, trying to access a drive that it cannot. It’s sad and stupid, watching that green stain in the address bar slowly and painfully not move as Windows lies gibbering on the floor. I deleted the mappings from the registry (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Network), changed explorers settings so it would start on “This PC” and did a hard reset to regain control of Windows. Yes, it’s true other parts of Windows were still functioning, but since explorer is both the shell and the file browser, i was unable to access these still functioning parts.
After that, I edited the pdf i needed to send to work, and when i went to send it, Outlook had decided it was time for me to re-authenticate. Not to my email account, which would make sense, but the account that office was subscribed to, forcing me to use 2FA to re-enable access to Outlook. Which meant i had to find my phone. Which was a pain in the ass as well. Why did Office decide i had to re-authenticate, when logged into the very domain account that is tied to this o365 account, is beyond me. It forces me to authenticate myself almost weekly.
There are several work arounds for the networking problems with Windows 10. but i have spent most of my life working around Windows and it’s bullshit. Sometimes, the only real solution for Windows issues is to install Debian
