When I do this it's because I'm irritated that it's hanging and I hope that my clicks will queue up and punish the insolent program. Kind of like sentencing it to 2,000,000,000 cycles of hard labor.
Fractions of a second of punishment seems far too little for this type of crime. I think the program should be punished for at least whole seconds.
Not applications, but I will refresh unruly/bad ui web pages with a timed auto-refresh (like every 5-10 seconds so I'm not overdoing it) with a 404 url that leaves a log messages related to whatever the annoyance is (in hopes the developer/sys admin will perhaps see it). If it's a really angry message, I will sometimes give an apology message a while later when I'm not so annoyed :)
Heh. Though speaking just for myself, I disable 404 notifications if there's no referrer, so I'd only see it if I happened to be trawling through the log with extreme care (i.e. never). If other developers are like me, you might want to use curl (or whatever) so that the referrer is actually set. In fact...I may start doing this.
Didn't think about it being filtered on no referrer, but that would make sense after thinking about it and why. I end up doing it hoping it has a better chance of reaching someone with the power to fix stuff in some of the larger companies. Going through the PR front end sometimes feels like a lesson in futility so might as well try to make it fun and hope someone listens while defusing web rage :)
Thanks.
Same for me. In terms of real life, something upsets you, you go punch a punching bag or beat up a pillow. In the computer world, I simply click as fast as possible until my frustration level lowers.