Why did the Windows 95 Start button have a secret shortcut for closing it?

1. Open the start menu, hold ctrl+shift, click the "power" button. A context-menu appears which lets you kill Explorer (explorer.exe).

2. Click on taskbar, press alt+f4, "Shut Down Windows" dialog appears. Holt ctrl+alt+shift and click "cancel" to kill explorer.exe

Anyone else know of interesting hidden shortcuts (not necessarily to kill explorer.exe)?

Raymond was knighted by Joel Spolsky as the compatibility camp hacker at Microsoft just when others at Microsoft were pushing for a reinvention of Windows.

Raymond has lots of really fascinating insights into how Windows works, which are interesting to even non-Windows coders like myself.

Everyone, go read his blog! :)

You could have all sorts of fun with the start button / task bar though. I remember writing a breakout game where the start button was the paddle. The code itself was very simple as it was basic Win32 APIs. As messy as those APIs were, they're lack of basic security made it great fun to write all sorts of weird hacks hehehe.

In fact, going back to the topic of MDIs (as the article referenced in relation to the WS_SYSMENU style), I wrote a basic program that would work as a winword 95 / 97 plug in (winword being an MDI back then) that would dump iexplore into winword so it would behave exactly like any other word document. This was done purely to get away with surfing the net in college as it was easier to hide your browser session behind a word document that it was to close/reopen it every time a lecturer walked past. IIRC that was just one API call (something like SetHwndParent?), but that was /years/ ago now and I've since left Windows development for Linux and Unix.

</nostalgia>

Up until then I'd been relying on Ctrl-Alt-Del, which in W7 tends to bring up its own screen and is slower due to shell context changes.