I was working at Microsoft during the switch to Skype for Business and the employees were dogfooding the beta. Terrible time to be alive.

Every step was about as fucked-up as every other.

     $ mdfind [thing]

     $ mdfind microsoft

I usually pipe it into a text editor (mdfind 1password | subl), use my editor to put rm or so rm at the beginning of each one, then paste it into terminal to run. That lets me audit the files first as opposed to xargs but I'm sure there's a million ways—the point is mdfind can be useful.

i was never able to track down what device it was, we reformatted a couple of laptops, wiped a couple phones.

  %appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

[1] https://github.com/winfsp/sshfs-win

It's not enough that we can just ignore or correct these things that are just happening on our own computers without our consent. These things should not be happening to begin with.

This, is it exactly.

Microsoft makes some very bad decisions, do not get me wrong. I agree with you and I think this is the core of why people complain so vehemently about Microsoft.

This goes to explain a lot of reactions that Very Online people tend to have to things. There must be a villain and that villain must be irredeemable. Even when, as the Brits would say, "cock-up" is a more likely explanation than "conspiracy."

Indeed, they've been playing shenanigans with OneDrive, but you can actually uninstall it now easily. That didn't used to be the case. Yes, it gets re-installed, yes it now is auto-enabling itself, but hey - you can easily remove it now.

I'm pretty sure I solved definitively the Teams autostart problem long ago, easily enough I can't recall what I did. It's not a problem for me, even on 'Home' machines.

Then after za'o decades of stories like the above (it is merely the most recent of many) one might wonder how does Microsoft with so many programmers and so much money produce such kusogeware? That continues to waste my time?

1. Windows has an absurdly short maximum path length of 260 characters.

2. On Windows, moving files to a temporary directory can fail, if the temporary directory has a longer prefix than the original path.

3. When uninstalling, the python utility "pip" first collects files into a temporary directory, then deletes that temporary directory.

4. To avoid running into MAX_PATH limits, pip doesn't use a normal temp directory. Instead, it makes a temporary directory adjacent to the directory it is removing. (https://github.com/pypa/pip/pull/6029)

5. If pip is interrupted while uninstalling, the adjacent temp directory is never deleted.

So, in order to work around a Windows-only problem, pip stopped using standard file locations, creating a new problem that only existed due to the workaround. And then I'm left trying to figure out why I'm running out of disk space.