IT - Troubleshooting Made Complicated

For the record, when you're out and about and you hear a tech person, in a professional environment, say that reloading the OS is the first step they take in troubleshooting a problem... then you should run... far far away and never look back.  Maybe I'm wrong... but it just seems to me like this is a waste of a lot of time when changing a few settings would prevent IE from randomly closing... but what the heck... it's not my profession...