No matter what kind of work you do with a PC, you almost always have to do some kind of impromptu troubleshooting at some point. One of the first things I've learned to check is this: Is the problem a system issue, or a user-profile configuration issue?
Here's a classic example. Earlier today, my copy of PowerDVD stopped working under Windows Vista -- which was odd, because it had been working fine the day before. (This led me to consider another classic debugging question: What changed between then and now?) Removing and reinstalling the program didn't fix anything, but logging in under a clean user profile did work -- the program ran fine there. Deleting the user-specific information for the program didn't work, though. Curiously enough, it would play the audio track on a DVD, just that the video would come out blank. That also in turn told me something: whatever had gone wrong was probably not within the application itself.
What else was left? One other thing came to mind: ATI's user-specific control settings for the video card. I fired up their support application and noticed that the preview pane for the video playback configuration was blank. Aha, thunk I, and tried changing the video playback settings there. Bling! The pane lit up. And, as luck would have it, PowerDVD started working again.
What happened? Odds are, some configuration information for the ATI driver got reset (although I'm still dubious how that happened). The application itself was never aware of it; it went on attempting to create DirectDraw surfaces without knowing there was any problem.
I've encouraged people to try and replicate any problems they have with a given app in more than one user account on the same machine. You never know what kind of insights it'll give you.
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