Windows 7With Microsoft looking for Windows 7 to bring users confidence back with Windows they do not need to run in to problems. Windows 7 test builds have be great, the performance has even surpassed Windows Vista. So far Windows 7 has been running smooth without any bugs until now.

Microsoft is not in panic mode as a major memory leak has been discovered in Windows 7’s RTM build. The memory leak has been discovered in the program chkdsk.exe. When scanning a second hard disk (a non-boot partition or second physical drive) using the "/r" (read and verify all file data) parameter the utility starts to leak memory like its a monsoon and quickly runs up a high enough memory debt that it blue screens and crashes the system. Microsoft is stating that the problem is not in the OS but that its caused by outdate drivers and telling there users to update there firmware. I don’t think that could be the case thought since the same thing happens in Virtual Box.

I think with this problem Microsoft is going to have to delay the release of Windows 7 since the problem is in Windows 7 only and not Vista the problem has to be in the Windows 7 file system, and that could take awhile to fix. I think this could be a big hit to Microsoft with all the hype Windows 7 has built up. I don’t see any other option for Microsoft since releasing Windows 7 broke would kill any hope for IT adoption and leave a major security hole, since all someone would have to do is gain access to  the system and run the utility to crash the system.

I guess if they hurry they might be able to find and fix the problem but I don’t see that happening since Microsoft has been unable to recreate the problem on any of its test systems and still states the problem is caused by faulty hardware. I think Microsoft needs to wake up and admit there is a problem and fix it, I think if they release a broken OS it will be Vista all over again.

Here’s what Steven Sinofsky President, Windows Division had to say: “

Hi there…sorry to get dragged into this. Of course always want to investigate each and every report of any unexpected behavior.

In this case, we haven’t reproduced the crash and we’re not seeing any crashes with chkdsk on teh stack reported in any measurable number that we could find. We had one beta report on the memory usage, but that was resolved by design since we actually did design it to use more memory. But the design was to use more memory on purpose to speed things up, but never unbounded — we requset the available memory and operate within that leaving at least 50M of physical memory. Our assumption was that using /r means your disk is such that you would prefer to get the repair done and over with rather than keep working.

While we appreciate the drama of “critical bug” and then the pickup of “showstopper” that I’ve seen,  we might take a step back and realize that this might not have that defcon level. Bugs that are so severe as to require immediate patches and attention would have to have no workarounds and would generally be such that a large set of people would run across them in the normal course of using their PC.

We appreciate the kind words that such a bug as above is “out of place” with Windows 7–we’re working hard. We are certainly going to continue to look for, monitor, and address issues as they arise if required. So far this is not one of those issues.

Some have reported (as above) that this specific issue repros and then goes away with updated drivers. We haven’t yet confirmed that either but continue to try. We just kicked off overnight stress testing of 40 machines of variants as reported by FireRx. We’ll see.

Let’s see if we can work on this one and future issues together. Deep breath :-)

–Steven”

What do you think Microsoft should do?