I imagine it would be frustrating to be the windows shell dev who has to investigate the torrent of bizarre memory corruption bugs that inevitably occur on Windhawk users’ machines after major OS updates. There’s really no avoiding it when you detour unstable “implementation detail” sort of functions across the taskbar/systray/start/etc. especially now that c++ coroutines are in widespread usage therein.

But to be fair, I understand the demand for products like this, because of several painful feature takebacks between 10 -> 11. It would be nice if cleaner approaches like wholesale shell replacement were still as straightforward as they were prior to windows 8. The “immersive shell” infra running in explorer + the opaque nature of enumerating installed UWPs + a bunch of other things make that almost impossible today.

From what I've learned: stuff like this makes up a not insignificant portion of the crash reports that come through. This results in crash dumps that are useless at best because they just look like memory corruption or badly written malware. In my discussions with folks about this, an annoying number of people who run this sort of software either a) do not care that it makes developing Windows harder for the devs or b) actively want the usable signal for the Windows development teams to be low.