Turns out that the earliest versions of Windows 7 took longer to load depending on your choice of desktop wallpaper

Cape Town, South Africa - June 27, 2011: Stickers on a new laptop computer brag about its equipment: the Windows 7 operating system and the Intel Core i3 processor chip. Part of the keyboard can be seen, out of focus, in the background.

There used to be a time when you'd log in to your Windows 7 machine, and have enough time to go fetch a cuppa as it thought about actually letting you past the welcome screen. Well, it turns out my younger self's retina-burning mauve desktop background may have been to blame.

Though many preferred Windows 7 to Windows Vista's quirks back in 2009, some users who set their desktop background as a solid block of colour found themselves staring at the welcome screen for up to 30 seconds—now we know why. Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen revealed in a recent blog post that this was likely due to a simple programming error (via PC World).