As if the dreaded "Blue Screen of Death" that plagues users of existing Windows variants weren't enough, some beta testers are reporting that they've encountered a new "Red Screen of Death" in early versions of Longhorn.

The first Red Screen of Death (RSOD) reports surfaced this past weekend on various Web logs, including one written by a Microsoft employee.

Michael Kaplan, a technical lead with Microsoft's Globalization Infrastructure, Fonts, and Tools unit, posted a screen shot of the RSOD in Longhorn on his blog on May 7.

"Windows Boot Manager has experienced a problem" read the text accompanying the red screen.

"I am not sure I would class the change as an improvement," Kaplan wrote. "I mean, the old message ("Windows cannot start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\System32") is one I understand since I know what the destructive operation was. But if I did not have that knowledge then I would not know much about what was going on.

"The new message, though, is even harder to understand (though an internet search of 0xc000000f will see it relates to Windows File Protection, which I guess is a hint," continued Kaplan.

The tale of RSOD spread furiously across the Web. Posters characterized the RSOD as the newer, more evil cousin of the current Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), which is displayed when Windows experiences a major error that will likely require a reboot to fix.

For their part, Microsoft officials are not denying that the RSOD exists. But they are characterizing the RSOD brouhaha as a "tempest in a teapot."

"The Red Screen does exist today if the Windows boot loader fails," acknowledged Greg Sullivan, a lead Windows product manager.

Sullivan said a variety of faults can trigger the screen in early Longhorn test versions. If a user inserts a non-system-floppy disk in a drive, for instance, the RSOD would result. A dead hard drive would result in the same screen.

But the RSOD is no different from the black screen that currently displays when existing versions of Windows experience a similar system failure, Sullivan said.

And new test versions of Longhorn won't display a red screen at all. Microsoft already has reverted back to a black screen for boot-loader failures in Longhorn, Sullivan said.

When Longhorn ships, "it will behave like Windows does today" in terms of the type and color of the screen generated during a boot-failure error, he said.

Sullivan said it was incorrect to characterize the type of failures that generated the RSOD as any more or less severe than those which could trigger a BSOD.

He also added that Microsoft has made the simplification and, ultimately, the elimination of confounding error messages a top priority for Longhorn. As graphics-driver failures tend to account for so many kernel-level failures in Windows today, Microsoft is working to shore up its driver story with the new Longhorn Display Driver Model (LDDM), which will be at the core of the new version of Windows, Sullivan said.