People have so varying experiences it's not even funny. I guess fail to boot means some update was required to initrd that didn't make it, but it's not somethin

People have so varying experiences it's not even funny. I guess fail to boot means some update was required to initrd that didn't make it, but it's not something that would be common among the mainstream stable distributions. I've certainly never seen it on hundreds of machines. Windows is a different story altogether. Not primarily because of some technical inferiority, but because people run all kinds of not-even-broken things with admin privs just because they got it in a box. Just last week someone pushed a mobile broadband stick in their Windows box. It purred and whirred for a while, and hasn't booted since. I've seen similar things before. (OT: I'd be grateful if anyone had any helpers on how to remove things selectively from the Windows boot process. There is a safe mode boot, which also hangs. Can I step through it, like on DOS? Can restore the boot related registry settings to an older version? Google doesn't help me at all here, and it seems like it should be a pretty common problem.)