On his site, Raymond Chen discussed earlier the origins of Dr. Watson. In fact the original name for the tool wasn't Dr. Watson at all, it was Sherlock. This can still be seen in the 16-bit version of the application. There's three pieces of evidence that give it away. The main windows procedure, SherlockWndProc, the main dialog procedure, SherlockDialog, and the template name given to the dialog box, SherDiag. The icons were a little different then too. The initial icon was a smoking pipe which was later changed to a doctor's bag with a stethoscope. The final change came when the icon with the doctor and a stethoscope together was introduced. When the port to Windows NT was made, all references to Sherlock were dropped. Sadly Dr. Watson was removed from Windows Vista to make way for Windows Error Reporting.