Mini-me (a.k.a. Paul, the guy in Bulgrohungria I'm mentoring) started on me before I could even finish my first cup of coffay. Admittedly I have a huge fucking ³/₄ liter mug but still, it's the principle that matters. I took a look at the ticket:

You said in order to fix our problem with ActiveX that we had to download Patchset G. We did. We patched the servers. We patched the handlers. And when we went to patch the Web servers, we got the error message, "setup can only be run on Windows". What's the problem here?

Strange. I'm looking at the profile and the company runs AIX on their servers. What the fuck is he doing? Running "./setup.exe"? Fuckwit.

Hi Dummy,

You need to run setup.aix, not setup.exe.

Mini-Me copypasta'd my actual response and sent it out. Half an hour later the guy's back. It's a Windows Web server, not AIX. Now I'm thinking "fuckwit" for a completely different reason, but then the error message makes no sense.

Until...

I checked his version of $OurBigApp. It's 3.c. He must be trying to install it on Windows 2003 and that'll work about as well as trying to run it on AIX or Solaris or SuSE or even an Atari 800. Instead of telling the guy flat out what the problem was, I reminded Mini-Me to add some eggs and milk. "Ask him what the server OS is, which SP level, which updates have been installed, have him send the msinfo file, etc." Which Paul did. An hour later we had confirmation of Windows 2003 not only in the lists of crap we asked for but also in some additional screenshots he'd thoughtfully sent. If only he'd sent that initially; the icons are the give-away.

Closed with a Root Cause: 6-Unsupported Architecture.

Today's 17 goes to the boneheads at Microsoft who write error messages like "This program is only designed to be run on Windows" which come up when you try to install something on Windows. If it's a versioning problem, tell me so , you fuckwits!