Bill Gates had a chat with David Rubenstein, Harvard Campaign co-chair for a Harvard fundraising campaign. In that Gates revealed that it was a mistake to force users to use hold down “Ctrl+Alt+Del†to log into their computers and he also blamed IBM for doing so.

 

“You want to have something you do with the keyboard that is signaling to a very low level of the software — actually hard-coded in the hardware — that it really is bringing in the operating system you expect, instead of just a funny piece of software that puts up a screen that looks like a log-in screen, and then it listens to your password and then it’s able to do that,†Gates said.

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If you are not attached to a Domain (i.e. a corporate network) or don't have the logon screen with password activated, then Ctrl-Alt-Del does no such thing at all: in Windows XP it brings up the Task Manager instead.

 

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I'd never even heard of that before I read Gates' "mistake" quote. Not surprised he considers it a mistake, it seems really stupid.