Microsoft said on Wednesday that it is looking into reports of a potential bug in the final version of Windows 7. However, Microsoft's top Windows executive said in a blog posting that the issue appears to be neither widespread, nor the "showstopper" that some are claiming it to be.
The issue, noted on several enthusiast sites this week, involves a fairly arcane process used to check for problems in a particular disk. Under certain scenarios, the site suggested Windows 7 would siphon off all the available memory to perform the scan, potentially crashing the system.
One report went so far as to characterize the issue as a potential "showstopper" that might derail the product's launch, while others such as ZDNet blogger Ed Bott have downplayed the threat.
However, in the discussion on one of the blogs, top Windows executive Steven Sinofsky said that the company is looking into the issue. But, he said that the company hasn't reproduced the crashing issue, nor has it gotten widespread reports of crashes.
"While we appreciate the drama of 'critical bug' and then the pickup of 'showstopper' that I've seen, we might take a step back and realize that this might not have that defcon level," Sinofsky wrote on the site. "Bugs that are so severe as to require immediate patches and attention would have to have no workarounds and would generally be such that a large set of people would run across them in the normal course of using their PC...So far this is not one of those issues."
Microsoft finalized the code for Windows 7 two weeks ago and is preparing to release it to developers in Microsoft's MSDN and Technet programs, as well as make it available to some large businesses, by this week. Those plans are continuing, a Microsoft representative said on Wednesday.
The Microsoft representative also confirmed that Sinofsky's comments were authentic and that Microsoft was looking into the issue, but declined to comment further.
This article was first published as a blog post on CNET News.
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