My little hack arrangement of Filezilla, FlingFTP, the WAMP stack and AbiWord for documentation hummed along smoothly for the first part of the day, gleefully grabbing files, moving them to a new location, uploading them to a server and then retrieving them on the other side of our corporate firewall until it all suddenly stopped in the afternoon.  We had n f*#$ing clue why.

We contacted the remote worker and tried to replicate the situation in the lab running a nearly identical rig and we experienced a similar crash when opening a program, so we fired up task manager and eyed the CPU usage as we opened various programs.  We started at about 80% and opened Outlook, when it dropped to 76%.  We opened Excel, it dropped to 72%… Finally we opened Word and it leveled off at 70%.  WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT.  The only way we were able to kill it?  By opening Powerpoint while running something in Microsoft Search 4.0 WHILE running Prime95 and searching for Mersenne primes, a phenomenon the remote worker probably wasn’t enacting.  Next I’ll find that Chrome is just Internet Explorer with a different theme and browser.bugs.enable set to “0”.