Digital Home Thoughts: Windows Vista Should Track Non-Responding Applications

That's the "White Screen of Wait" (WSOW) - when an application stops responding and you try to interact with it, Windows Vista will fade the application white to indicate that there's a problem with it. I see that more often than I care to admit when using Windows Vista, and I have the gut feeling it happens more often than it did with Windows XP. Thankfully, the rest of Vista remains snappy and responsive, but I wish I could understand why some applications are so prone to WSOWs. Vista has a great tool called the Reliability and Performance Monitor, and it keeps track of how often applications crash (like when I was having a really bad day with Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0), software that you install and un-install, hardware failures, etc. What it doesn't keep track of, however, is how often WSOWs happen. If it did, it would give Microsoft (and us as users) hard metrics about which applications are prone to random lock-ups. I wish WSOWs didn't happen, but so long as they continue happening, we should be able to track them.