> Every last "terminal" would be displaying identically the same seconds pixels Playing Windows Engineer's advocate for a moment: Yes, you could potentially r

> Every last "terminal" would be displaying identically the same seconds pixels Playing Windows Engineer's advocate for a moment: Yes, you could potentially render out the pixels in some shared buffer, and make that buffer available to every session, or perhaps copy it 100x. That's data crossing security boundaries, so could perhaps be a vector for compromising a session. Then there's the consideration for people with different font sizes for UI - say someone who needs large fonts or high contrast modes. Don't forget different Region settings. Not everyone's dates and times are formatted the same. Also different taskbar configurations - maybe they've got the taskbar snapped left/right, or have the taskbar height set differently. You've rendered this pixel buffer, but Session N's UI thread has locked up because Bob is using this application written by a work-experience kid 10 years ago, and it uses the UI thread to do CPU intensive or IO work. So, while it's waiting for a response from a server on the other end of a congested ISDN line on another continent, it blocks everything on the UI from updating. So now the central time rendering session might have to wait, causing everyone's time to stop updating, at best, or at worst, completely lock up. Most of these things have solutions, I guess - but I'd say the MS engineers decided "Yeah, nah" on that.