Oh boy! It appears that Microsoft’s glowing track record with Windows 7 is about to come to an abrupt and unceremonious end. According to various Web sources, the RTM build 7600.16385 includes a potentially fatal bug that, once triggered, could bring down the entire OS in a matter of seconds.
Windows president tries to calm fears of Win 7 critical bug
The bug in question – a massive memory leak involving the chkdsk.exe utility – appears when you attempt to run the program against a secondary (i.e. not the boot partition) hard disk using the “/r” (read and verify all file data) parameter. The problem affects both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and is classified as a “showstopper” in that it can cause the OS to crash (Blue Screen of Death) as it runs out of physical memory.
"Bugs that are so severe as to require immediate patches and attention would have to have no workarounds and would generally be such that a large set of people would run across them in the normal course of using their PC."
Reports of a potential critical bug come a day before Microsoft is set to make Windows 7 available to MSDN subscribers. General availability is slated for Oct. 22.
