Paint me into a corner

I know that Microsoft Paint is one of the least intelligent graphics programs available.  My children like to use it sometimes, precisely because it is simple.  But on Windows, anything simple can be rendered impossible if you know how.  Or even if you don’t.

Today I was torn away from my work by a user emergency:  the “tool box” in Paint was no longer visible.  Yet, selecting “View/Tool Box” from the menu (or Ctrl+T) had no effect.  I presumed that somehow my son had managed to drag the tool box out of view, so I brought up Spy++ to look for the window.  I found it easily enough as a child of the main “Paint” window.  To my surprise, the tool box window’s rectangle had a zero width — even though the tool box isn’t sizable by the user.

“How on earth…” I wondered.  But long ago I learned not to waste time trying to figure out how users get themselves into situations unless it helps to figure how to get them out.  In this case, Spy++ reported that the left side of the tool box was still docked to the left side of Paint, but there wasn’t anything visible of it that you could grab with a mouse.

Since Spy++ also gave me the window handle, I tried writing a C program to change the window’s width.  This worked after a fashion, creating a swath of gray, but there was still nothing to grab in order to resize it – and the tools were still not visible.  Restarting Paint went back to a zero-width tool box.

I googled and googled, and searched through the registry looking for where this kind of information might be saved — to no avail.  In the end, I logged on as another user — which restored defaults.  That shows me that the settings are saved per user — most likely in the registry somewhere under HKEY_CURRENT_USER — but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out where.  Searching the built-in Help wasn’t helpful at all, either.

Has anyone else run into this?

Design lesson:  if you want to make a product simple, provide a simple way to completely start over with defaults.  Don’t assume that your product is too simple to get FUBAR.