On the subject of overzealous useage of XBRA Allan Pratt had the following
words of advise:
``It's just that I would have big banners all over it saying that
vector stealing is a bad idea in the first place. There are
just a few vectors that you can legally steal, and a few more that
you can reasonably steal. I would use only legal vectors
and legal uses in the examples. One kind of legal use for
a legal vector is a RAMdisk using hdv_rw (and _bpb and _mediach).
Also, talk about unhooking vectors needs a whole raft of warnings
about what a bad idea this is.
The right way to do almost anything that involves vector stealing is to use a TSR in the AUTO folder as a driver, and have a foreground program communicate with that driver, usually through a trap it's stealing or through the cookie the driver left in the cookie jar. Then there's never a question of unhooking. The driver is generally small enough that you don't mind having it around even when you're not using the program in question.
I guess I would just like to see more in the way of caveats, so people won't read this document and think that vector stealing is the best way to do something. It often isn't. But that's all gravy on top of the actual stated goal of the document, which is to describe XBRA itself.''