I don't think it's really fixable. As I mentioned, Windows has gotten too complex, and one of the reasons why is that there is too much legacy cruft. Some bug in a random piece of software flipped a bit somewhere in the registry that upsets another piece of software? Good luck ever finding that. And is the registry ever going to go away? Nope. Not unless MS decides to break with backwards compatibility on an apocalyptic scale.

To give you a real life example, just last week I was trying to get my Win10 laptop to do local DNS lookups successfully. (I run dnsmasq on my home LAN, and I have it resolve names like "router" or "server" or whatever.) Not a problem on Linux or MacOS, but on Windows it's often a problem. Why? I don't know. There are all kinds of different ways Windows looks up names -- NetBIOS, WINS, DNS, etc., and they interact unpredictably from where I sit. I'm not the only one with this problem so I found a lot of blog and Stackoverflow posts with various fixes. I applied one of them by adding "." to the end of all local lookups. Seemed to work just fine.

Two nights ago it stopped working. Then I rebooted. That made it work again. Last night it stopped working. I rebooted. Nope. Local DNS is no more.

Why? I have no clue. So I'll just go try some other random fix to see if it works.

This process of applying random fixes should seem familiar to anybody who troubleshoots black boxes. I really don't want my OS to be this much of a black box.