Having a help system in a MS Windows application (or any application) is critical. No matter how intuitive your software is, somone will not understand it. Additionally, some software is just too complex to access all of it's features without a help system. This is why, in most Windows applications you use, the F1 key brings up the help menu. Sometimes, this help is related to what you are doing... which is pretty cool, as the answer to your question is then usually just a click or two away. This is all well and good... in theory. In practice, however, the help system in MANY Microsoft apps is fundamentally flawed. The user smacks the F1 key, whether mistakenly or on purpose, and here is what they see. For the next 5+ minutes, the application that they were working in becomes unusable as this process does it's job. It's preposterous to think that the user WANTS to sit there waiting for this, especially when they are asking for a little help with the application. If you had asked the user, before pushing F1, if they wanted to waste the next 5 minutes staring at their computer screen before (possibly) being provided with their answer, I guarantee most would say no. The fact is, the help system isn't WORTH this hell. For some reason, MS didn't make this seemingly unnecssary task run in the background. If they had said "We are preparing your help system. It will be ready in a few minutes. You can continue working while this process goes on", it would have still been fairly unacceptable, but at least it wouldn't interrupt your work. Even worse is when a user presses the F1 key by mistake (as I did before taking this screen shot). It amazes me that there can be a key on the keyboard that, with a single press, can make your work stop for 5 minutes. It should be called the "Fuck Yourself" button... because it is essentially what it accomplishes.