Lucky me, my very own bug
Maybe they'll name it “the Flanagan Flaw” or the “Joshua Distortion“. Ok, back to reality, more likely something like “Bug #56279”.
There I was, minding my own business, trying to create a WinForms client that would enable drag and drop uploads to my photo album website. I innocently created an owner drawn listbox to show a thumbnail of each image waiting to be uploaded, along with some relevant details (caption, date taken, etc). I also made the listbox auto-resize with the form (using the nifty Anchor feature) so that the full text of long captions could be read. All was going according to plan, that is, until I tried to run the application. That's when I noticed the very ugly (lack of) repainting of the listbox items. The currently selected item would redraw exactly as expected, but all of the other items just looked like a bunch of black freckles.
Surely I was missing something. I must have been missing that one line of code that would fix it all, and everyone would laugh at me and question my computer hacker skills for not noticing it, and then I'd never get a girl (other than my wife, of course). Despite the threat of humiliation, I posted to the newsgroups to find the solution. Within a day, there was a response from Microsoft support. It wasn't the “read the freakin manual“ response I was hoping for. It was more along the lines of “hey, you're right, I'll notify the appropriate group”.
Which brings us to now. With that sour feeling, I've decided to make lemonade, and claim ownership to my very own bug. Just for good measure, I also submitted it to the Product Feedback center as an open bug in VS2005. Here's hoping they give it a good name.