This may just be my all-time favourite error message:
Note that the promulgator of the message doesn’t identify itself (the caption bar is helpfully labelled “DLL”); that the program to be loaded isn’t identified; that the format isn’t identified; that what you might do to fix the problem isn’t identified…
Oh, and by the way… a little detective work shows that it comes from Adobe Acrobat.
Missing story: As an end-user, I would like an error message to give me some clue how to isolate & fix a problem.
There is one progression to this style of bug reporting: "It doesn't work". Almost as helpful 🙂
I hit something similar today.
"Error in processing have been generated. Please try again."
By the way the action was accepted and there did not appear to be a problem other then the error message.
I still have fond memories of the "Error: Can't print" error messages generated by Wordsworth (a word processor on the Amiga).
We never did get printing working.
I think this is my favorite error message of all time. At this time, I had one program running: notepadd . This was, however, during my first week of using WinVista – so I secretly hoped it was in there. Since notepadd is opensource, I could dig through that – yep, that's where the error was.
http://davidwkennedy.com/photos/misc/gdexception.jpg (Alas, this link appears to have vanished. —MB)
I think my favorite error message was a confirmation dialog that said: “Error encountered while cancelling” and two buttons “OK” and “Cancel”.
What, exactly, is supposed to happen if I click “Cancel” to an error message like that?
Sorry, not confirmation dialog but an error dialog; I got distracted while writing that short comment.