autoexec.bat
Back in the days of win3.1 , dos 6.22 I started work at a college. They had just started "getting organised" cos 'puters were a thing now that everbody needed , not just tech students , so , very forward thinkingly , they centralised things and divided the IT staff into server and desktop ( IT / grunts ) and put a wall between them . So the job went from a groovy chilled "hey! try this" , "learn about that ... " , "heres a new thing we bought - youre the one to master it" to:
"Stick this floppy in and reimage it" . I was on the wrong side . I should have left a lot earlier (did 8 yrs).
Now in my corner of the college , the PCs were booting up , and then failing to "Find the network" quite often , but not all the time .This didnt seem to unduly bother the only people with the ability to do anything about it - the server boys , as they dont face the ire of the users. A fact still true today at most places. And so this went on for months. with much , quite justified , complaining from the users - at me.
In desperation i re-rewrote the autoexec.bat so that when it had loaded the multiple files necessary to connect to the network (novell) it checked if it had worked , and if not loaded them again. This worked as a workaround , but performance still bad.
One day one of my higher-ups and betters was passing through , sees the problem , looks at the switch up in a cab in the corner that we had No Access To and says "Ooh , look , this is all set up to be as shit as possible - its all 10mb half duplex , no wonder its slow ...