An interesting counterpoint -- or at least, a tempering perspective -- is the story that made the rounds recently about a consultant who was called in to fix an

An interesting counterpoint -- or at least, a tempering perspective -- is the story that made the rounds recently about a consultant who was called in to fix an unstable Linux kernel driver: The company programmer was slavishly fixing each symptom as it popped up during boot -- that is, each "first problem" he saw. The consultant instead took a look at the code from a holistic perspective, and was able to fix the root cause. So while sometimes the temporally-first problem is the root cause, sometimes it's just a symptom. Look for the _logically_ first problem which precipitates the symptoms.