Opinion: What's the most misleading error message you've ever seen?

I was part of a discussion the other day where the topic was the most misleading error message you’ve ever seen. I’ve been in the industry long enough that it’s a pretty tall list of error messages that I need to consider.

The winner for me

But I finally decided on one:

Back in the VB6 days, there was a common error message that said Out of Memory.

There were many issues that could lead to that error message, but running out of memory was probably the least likely.

I’ve lost track of the number of users that I’ve seen trying to add memory to machines to fix that problem.

The most common cause

What the message should have let you know, most of the time, was that You have moved or removed a DLL that I was depending upon.

That’s classic work by whoever wrote that error message. They obviously decided that the only reason that we can’t load a DLL that used to be there is that we must have run out of memory. (sigh)

Let’s do better

Surely we developers can do better than this. The next time that one of us feels the need to expose a message that says The parameter is incorrect or Unexpected error or Oops something went wrong or Catastrophic error, etc. etc., please can we spend a few more cycles thinking about how to surface something more meaningful that would give the user some chance of understanding the issue?

2026-03-23