Drivers
We were developing some military kit. Hardware dev. in UK, s/w in US. The US had a mock-up rig of the h/w so that they could debug. In the UK we were always having problems which the US couldn't replicate - startup fails, BSOD, etc. They blamed us, of course, and things were getting rancorous. In the end they sent some SW engineers team over to find the problem. After a fair bit of work they found that the SW configuration of our kit was different from the mock-up in the US. We'd obviously been messing round with it, which wasn't allowed, and heads were going to roll.
The US team had a support contract with a UK company to maintain/repair the servers, processors, printers, etc. Turns out that when the support company sent someone to check or repair something they also did a scan of the system and updated any drivers that were out of date. The support contract had no means of ensuring that changes like these were either authorised by the US or mirrored in the test rig. Since the US company was responsible for the contract it was their fault. US heads never rolled and the Yanks never apologised.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
