I have encountered a major, major, problem with a production machine. I admit that is was of my own making and I blame no-one else.
The story so far: I have one machine that was running Windows XP SP1, it just happened to be my main production machine. It wasn't SP1 out of choice, I wanted to patch it to SP2 but each time an attempt was made I got an unusual error message (just before the SP2 update failed) saying that Windows could not read or write to the database. This perplexed me no little mainly because, to my knowledge, there was no database present on the machine and secondly, even if there were a database present, why was Windows trying to read it anyway? Some digging around produced an element of explanation: for "database" read "file system"! So, Windows couldn't read or write to its own file system? It managed every other patch and update, what is so special about SP2?
The machine is quite large and carries two hard drives so, my obvious move was to put Acronis Disk Director Suite on the machine, do some nifty partitioning and copy the "C" drive to a back-up. No problemo. I then force fed the machine a repair console job from the original XP disk to rebuild the system into something that Windows could read and write to. So far, so good.
I then applied all fixes and inserted the SP2 disk. Yay, it worked.
Then I looked at the partition tables .... I'd acquired 2 new partitions? One claimed to be empty (just under 1Mb), the other was about the size of the original "C" partition. I rebooted the machine. It didn't like it! It was cross booting from two partitions. The boot.ini file was on one partition and the system files (particularly NTLDR) on another! A search produced the unexpected result that the boot.ini file was on partition "E" and NTLDR on "C". The obvious solution seemed to be to make a new boot file and place it on "C" ... ok, I know now!
I'd just finished doing something else and was returning to the boot.ini problem when a bit of maintenance software, that had been running in the background, popped up a message to say it had finished doing its job and would now restart Windows, was this ok and if not click "Cancel". I wasn't quite on the ball as I ignored the message. The machine shut down. It restarted and ....
Acronis cannot find NTLDR "Press etc., etc., to restart". Switch boot discs and Windows cannot find a valid boot.ini, "Press etc., etc., to reboot". There's an empty boot.ini file that doesn't tell either method of starting where the "real" boot files are.
Having spent nearly two weeks on this I'm about to have a go with fixntldr (from the incredibly helpful site http://tinyempire.com).
Have I tried the Acronis rescue disk (yup, I made one)? Yes, I can even see the empty friggin' boot.ini file but when I try and delete it, the system crashes and when I reboot the rescue disk the sodding file's still there! The Windows install disc? Yup, it tells me that it cannot find a Windows o/s (not so suprising as it's hitting the Acronis o/s selector and not getting any further). A reinstall also fails as it's an XP upgrade disc and is looking for an older o/s to update from (long since deleted) and all I have is an OEM recovery disc.
I hope to be able to get into one drive at least, recover what I can then attempt to rebuild the o/s.
All because I created a system file and delayed putting any information in it and then ignored a message that I'd ignored on a regular basis for several years - never again!

For the fourth or fifth time in the last couple of weeks I've noticed - falling over dead tired does that to you - that I've been working and then info-browsing for in excess of 30 hours. At the end of those 30 hours my monetary gain is zip but my mental and learning gain are on a high.

I was trying to understand why I stopped working 35 hours a week (for which I got paid, even in today's terms, a small fortune) for a company that sent me all over the world, gave me a car, pension, humungous expense account and a directorship, to form my own small company? OK, I own it and technically am a CEO but that means diddly when there's no beans coming through the door.

I then had that flash of lucidity that only comes from lack of sleep and overdosing on caffein and nicotine - I can just do what I choose for 30 or 40 hours straight, precisely because I do work for myself.

Why this lengthy preamble? To put things into some sort of perspective, that's why.
Having recently read the blog of a Microsoft employee explaining, from his viewpoint, why Vista is late and the replies to his post (and then the /. related posings) from the varied audience. Having discounted the loony fringe - the Mac is god devotees, the ABMers/NBMers and the plain deranged - there were some good points being made, both technical and managerial. Most of them were, ultimately, time related.

The Vista delay is, according to the MS blogger, a feature of deadlines passed up and down an 11 tier management system, with the mid to top levels not wanting to hear the truth from the lower mid to bottom tiers - I've had direct experience of this form of management and, I'm embarrassed to say, have contributed to it.
Deadlines are, in my experience, self defeating as they tend to be set by people with no direct knowledge or understanding of the work required and, often as not, the bod's at the sharp end are either too much in awe or just too scared to tell the top level that it can't be done in that time frame.

I don't undertake anything as complicated as Windows Vista - though, were I in charge, I may have been tempted to say "OK, this time we'll do it right. Out with the legacy stuff. Build and then stress test the stuff for as long as it takes, then give it to all those MVP's out there and tell them to break it. Shipping date is when we're ready to give it to the public and there won't be any SP1's, 2's or any other damn patches - it will be battle hardened and ready for mainstream deployment." - but whatever I do take on has to meet two criteria, 1. I want to do it, and 2. It is done at my pace, it is done right and it won't break when the client uses it (sometimes I even get paid for it!).
I suspect that this would be an anathema to many software houses now but wouldn't have been thirty years ago, as that was very much how it was done then.
To a large extent that is how the OSS works now, outside of the operating / service companies. Independent developers work on the bits they want, when they want and, due to the continuous release model of Open Source, if the bit they are working on doesn't make that build, it will make a future one after peer review, compatability checking and some form of stress testing.

That, to me, sums up why I did go off on my own - I missed the freedom to do what interests me, in my own time regardless of whether I got paid for it or not. I could start learning again, dreaming up ideas, trying something out for the sheer hell of it. Maybe that is a work ethic? Maybe not, but it beats the crap out of being a wage-slave. And the 30 hours? It was mine to spend and I did it becuase I wanted to.