I've noticed a few times now that I go to restart a Windows test machine or VM, see the Shutting Down spinner, and then turn my attention to something else while that's in progress. When I come back, Windows is showing the PIN entry screen (as expected after a restart). However, sometimes I'd enter my PIN, and when the desktop came up, some apps that I'd been using were still showing on the screen. When this happened on Win 11, my first thought was that this was new behavior; "I did restart, but Windows has restored some apps I had running before restarting...".
What really happened was that Windows UI misled me. It lied. When it said that it was Shutting Down, it was actually checking to see whether it could shut down[^1]. The difference being that I'd already turned my attention to something else (or headed off for coffee, etc).
To make matters worse, the prompt that eventually comes up (saying that such-and-such app is preventing restart) times out very quickly and the screen locks. Since the user has likely walked away, that makes some sense -- can't leave the system unlocked for security reasons. In Windows 11, when the screen locks, there's a chime that sounds very similar to the chime you expect to hear when Windows starts (after a restart). When you turn your attention back to the screen (after hearing a chime), the PIN entry screen is visible. Unless a user is present and watching the screen, a successful and aborted restart are almost indistinguishable from one another.
I've had to re-do days worth of testing once I realized that any conclusions I made based upon the belief that I had restarted (either to get a 'freshly-booted' system, or for something that required a restart in order to take effect) had to be discarded and redone.
There are other examples of this in Windows' past. In Vista, someone at MS decided that a file copy progress bar should always show progress (vs. being tied to actual file copy progress, as it had been previously). I can imagine the thinking behind this, but the result of LYING about progress was also (predictably) bad:
At that time, in my job I frequently had to copy large numbers of files around, and those operations could take 30-45 minutes to complete. So, I'd usually try to fire one off just before leaving for lunch or going home. In Vista, I initiated the file copy in File Explorer, a File Copy progress window popped up, and immediately started showing progress. NOTE: It wasn't just a "marquee" animation, it was an actual left-to-right progress bar. Satisfied that things were underway, I headed off.
When I returned, the copy hadn't completed. The progress bar had advanced, but for some reason it was moving much more slowly now. I busied myself with other things and let it run for a few more hours. After lots of periodic checking, I noticed that progress was getting slower and slower, and it looked like this copy operation might take over a day to complete. I don't recall now whether I let it run overnight, or restarted the copy a few times, or what. I do remember that I eventually noticed a popup in a corner of another screen (multi-screen desktop) from File Explorer asking "Copy these 987,654,321 files to X:\abc\def ?".
I eventually realized what had happened. File copying hadn't even begun. Windows had tallied up the files to be copied and then prompted me for confirmation (like it had in earlier versions of Windows). I would have expected this, but there'd been a progress bar SHOWING PROGRESS the entire time. How could that be if it was waiting for me to reply to a confirmation popup?
The progress bar was a lie, that's how. It was being animated at that point only to give the impression of action. Some misguided person(s) at Microsoft though it was more important for a user to "feel" that progress was being made during lengthy operations than to actually tie the progress bar to units of progress. Since a progress bar like that mustn't ever REACH 100% when it's advancing solely for that reason, it had been programed to start at a typical pace, but keep getting slower and slower as it approached the 100% mark. When I realized this I was both stunned and infuriated.
Please don't do this kind of thing. I know the kind of people in an organization that think this sort of thing is a good idea, and I appeal to you to RESIST. If our tools lie to us, what chance do we have of making the right decisions and conclusions? "Garbage in, garbage out"
Thank you.
--Scott Smith
[^1]: I realize that shutdown closes apps one-by-one, and some apps may not respond to a close request. But "Shutting Down..." doesn't convey anything about how likely it is for this lengthy operation to be canceled. Instead, perhaps a vertical list of running processes that are checked off as they're terminated, or just "Attempting to close running apps..." to convey the possibility of failure. In any case, the ease with which one outcome can be conflated with the opposite unless the user is paying careful attention ought to be addressed.