Why Microsoft has the name of an old mouse hidden in its Bluetooth drivers

Lurking within the Windows Bluetooth stack is a hardcoded reference to the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000. Is this nostalgic favoritism from Microsoft? Or is it just somebody, somewhere, making a mistake that an engineer had to work around?

You'll be unsurprised to know that, according to veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen, it's the latter.

"There is a lot of bad hardware out there," writes Chen, "and there are a lot of compatibility hacks to deal with it." There's hardware that spouts nonsense or does things that it says it absolutely won't (Chen cites the example of a USB device that drew more power than it promised it would.) Still, the vast majority can be dealt with behind the scenes with code that can repair or ignore corrupted values.

However, sometimes something gets screwed up so badly while appearing deceptively innocuous that extreme measures are ...