When the setup finished, the system didn't reboot to a friendly welcome. It dropped him to a command prompt. He typed explorer.exe . The shell loaded, but it was stripped down. No My Documents. No Recycle Bin. Just a stark, gray window and a single shortcut: \Windows\System32\hal.dll.
Curious, he opened it in a hex editor. The data stream wasn't machine code. It was a long string of ASCII text: