A little geek humor at Microsoft

Just discovered a little geek humor at Microsoft. 

I have the unfortunate task of upgrading a VB6 app to run properly under Vista.  No, I could not upgrade the app to .Net, just "fix" the VB app and its installer.  So I'm installing VB6 in a Vista virtual machine (do not want to mess up my host machine), and having a little problem when starting VB, an error that mscomctl.ocx is not registered.  But it is, and I hunt down Dependency Walker (Depends) to make sure.  It's OK, and its components are OK, also. 

So I run profiler from Depends to start up VB6 and see what happens.  Find an error message*, and stop the profiler. That in turn stops the VB6 application, and profiler dutifully logs the exit return code, and helpfully translates the exit code to hex:

Terminating process by user's request.
Exited "VB6.EXE" (process 0xB84) with code 57005 (0xDEAD).

Had to chuckle.  And then went to calc.exe to confirm, decimal 57005 is hex 0xDEAD.

(*for what it's worth, the error is "GetProcAddress(0x75E70000 [KERNEL32.DLL], "IsTNT") called from "MSCOMCTL.OCX" at address 0x27588909 and returned NULL. Error: The specified procedure could not be found (127)."  Now I got to got figure that one out.)