The programs in this set are the kind that have always fascinated me. I enjoy little programs that are made to irritate people, but that do no harm to people's systems. I've written a few myself, and had a few people sneak some onto my machine as well, so I guess it evens out. I particularly like Michael's style in setting them up so that they aren't too much of a nuisance. After all, they're fine for a little while, and then they get really irritating if they stick around. Gopher.exe and Blast.exe are other good examples of this kind of program, but they don't have the nice feature of letting the victim decide when enough is enough short of restarting Windows from scratch. These programs are nice about that.
There was only one flaw in the programs as far as I was concerned though: Windows never really has enough memory in the first place, (does any program?) and these programs, as they were, kept grabbing more and more memory to load the bitmaps. Then, although an admirable attempt at removing the program was made, the excess bitmaps weren't removed with the program. This isn't Michael's fault. The blame belongs purely to Windows. It seems that unlike ICONS and MENUS etc, bitmaps and cursors belong to the GDI, and not the program. So unless you store every handle for every bitmap loaded, you can't get rid of them when you exit the program, and the GDI keeps them around. The original version of Face.exe would load the bitmap each time it was put on the display, creating another GDI resource. When the program ended (after about 100 popups), it would remove the last bitmap created. Unfortunately, that still left 99 copies of it in memory.
I cleaned up this problem, and hopefully the changes I made will help other people to use Windows memory a little more efficiently. I first learned about this problem when someone put a copy of blast on my machine. I thought it was cute, so I let it run. Until I closed all of the applications I had running, and left the computer to go to lunch. When I got back, I couldn't even run NotePad, and the disk was going crazy discarding memory blocks and loading in new ones every time I changed directories in the MS-DOS executive. Finally I found out what caused the problem, and what to do about it.
Anyway, here are the "fixed" versions of the programs. I hope you like them as much as I did, Michael really did a nice job. I also hope you can use the modifications I made to save some of that precious and too too expensive resource - memory - ($13 for a chip?)
