Not-tech-savvy people just trying stuff has its drawbacks.
Former-boyfriend-now-husband, after having used my secondary computer: "I downloaded this software and it's not doing what it is supposed to do."
Me: "Uh, you downloaded something and ran it on my computer? Did you check it's no virus or dialer?"
He: "I know it must be legit, I typed OK in a field."
Me thinking: Waaaaaaaaaah. (Always dialers, these.)
He: "And besides, I didn't save it. There were the options "save on computer" and "run locally", and I didn't choose save, but run locally, so it can't have done something to your computer."
It all depends which location one thinks of when reading locally, he thought it meant the server it came from. It doesn't help that the German "vor Ort" is even more ambiguous than "locally".
(I got him on Kubuntu now. No more virus hunting finally.)
Step-dad: "I can't start AOL. It says the disk is full."
Me: "Shouldn't really prevent AOL from starting, it's only creating a 0-byte lock file I think ... tell me, *how* do you start AOL?"
Step-dad: "Well, I insert the CD and then I click on Continue Continue Continue"
Me: "Wait, why did you insert the CD? You don't need the CD to start AOL, just double-click on the icon on your desktop."
Step-dad: "But it said I have to do it."
Me: "What exactly did it say?"
Step-dad: "such and such error message. Please re-start AOL."
So AOL finally added some sensible information to their error message - restarting the AOL software solves most of its problems - but didn't consider that their target group does not know the difference between "restart" and "reinstall". I think I found 8 AOL installations on his computer.
Also, my former-boyfriend-now-husband used to delete all programs instead of uninstalling them, resulting in some strange problems on his Win98.
And then there was the case of an acquaintance who sorted the files in the win directory by filetype from the folders they were in into folders that matched their extensions (not subfolders of the previous folders) ...
/edit: ardvaark party!
