And that's it? Interviewer saw that as reason enough for you to fail the interview? Be glad you didn't get in!

In this case I was being asked to supply an example of a GUI I had worked on in the past, and the relevant program was installed on my laptop and there was no publicly installable version. I don't blame them at all, the problem was entirely mine.

More likely it's a time issue: Every minute spent fiddling with your laptop is a minute not spent on the coding problem that's being used to evaluate you.

I completely bombed an interview because they gave me a laptop but refused to supply a mouse. Plus the laptop touchpad scrolled in the opposite direction to what I was used to. I felt quite sorry for the interviewers who had to sit silent for ten minutes watching me try to copy a function from one file to another.

Mark and rikroots, I'm curious about how long it took for you to travel to the interview and back

Not long at all for me. In fact the company was next door to another place I had worked in the past.

Ok, good it was close