kane_magus: (Default)
Found a bug in Windows today. Yeah, shocking I know. It's quite obscure though, and is quite a pain in the ass.

Ok, so, if you create a new user account with your username as ﯔ (which is "Arabic Letter Ng Final Form" according to Windows Character Map), when you log into it, it will apply settings and make the account as normal. If you then make a new user account with username as שּׁ (which is "Hebrew Letter Shin With Dagesh And Shin Dot") and log into that, it will make the account as expected. However, if you then go back and try to log into ﯔ again, it will instead log you into שּׁ. And, if you then make yet another account called ﬠ (which is "Hebrew Letter Alternative Ayin"), and log into that one, trying to go back to either ﯔ or שּׁ will log you into ﬠ instead.

To make things more complicated, though, if at any point in the process above you were to make an account called ﻎ (which is "Arabic Letter Ghain Final Form"), this account will be created properly and won't incorrectly point to any of the ones above, nor will they point to it. This is not to say that it totally works, because it doesn't seem to do so, just that it doesn't break in the same way that the ones above break.

Those are just a few of the non-ASCII characters that I happened to try at random today, and it is extremely likely that there are many many other such characters that screw things up (or otherwise inexplicably work normally for the most part). Many applications will exhibit weird behavior or not work at all if installed and/or run on the misbehaving user accounts. Firefox, for example, refused to start at all.

On a semi-related note, though being busy as I was today and the latter half of yesterday helped to alleviate some of the blah I've been feeling over the past week or so, I'm still glad I decided to take tomorrow off. Viva la three-day weekend!

Date: 2006-06-23 02:56 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] rabbitucker.livejournal.com
If I may ask, how did you become so knowlegeable about Hebrew and Arabic alphabets?

Date: 2006-06-23 05:35 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] kane-magus.livejournal.com
I actually know nothing of Hebrew and Arabic alphabets, except that using some of the characters as Windows user account names works and some of them don't. ^^; Originally, we were trying to test the issue with Chinese characters, and while one of the guys was running in the Chinese native Windows OS, I decided to play around with some other non-ASCII characters in English Windows using the Character Map just to see what happened, and it just happened to be that the ones I chose at random came from those character sets. It's highly likely that other non-ASCII characters besides the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets exhibit the same issue. For example, I also know that Ā ("Latin Capital Letter A With Macron" according to the Character Map) is one of the ones that mostly sort of works.

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