Calling up help in Excel 2000 invokes an inane but earnest animation of a paper clip. Short of hacking the registry I turned off every possible option that might indicate that I am a moron. Nevertheless, Mr. Clippy would still occasionally spring into life with a little animated dance of glee.
My response to this was to left-click on Clippy, choose "hide" and send him back to the netherworld of the toolbar. After doing this several times in a row he presented me with the following dialog:
"You've hidden me several times now. Would you like to permanently turn me off or just hide me again?"
Why yes, I though, yes I would. So I choose the "Yes, turn me off" option, called up the function dialog, hit F1 and ...
Clippy was back.
When I saw his will to survive I stopped trying to kill him. In fact we live quite happily now and I was even thinking of writing a warnings::clippy pragma.
Name "main::foo" used only once: Would you like help with that?
$^O ne MSWin32 at -e line 1: Would you like to install WindowsXP?
It amazes me, the will of instinct.
