Following the loss of the personal records of some 25 million child benefit recipients by Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs this month, the UK government will be acutely aware of how quickly mismanagement of technology can lead to serious problems.

While technology wasn't to blame per se in the HMRC data loss, there are plenty of recorded examples where faulty hardware and software have cost the organizations concerned dearly, both financially and in terms of reputation — and resulted in some near misses for the public.

Here's our considered list of some of the worst IT-related disasters and failures. The order is subjective — with number one being the worst — so feel free to comment using the Talkback facility below if you disagree or have suggestions for disasters we may have missed.

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Here are 10 tricks that aren't publicly know. A couple of these tips could really save you some big headaches.

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Symptoms:

When you click a mailto: URL in IE or outlook many IE windows pop up with an error action cancelled. The following error also pops up

"Could not peform this operation bebacuse the default mail client is not properly installed"

Cause:

1. the Mailto handler is not setup correctly
2. Missing URL protocol registry value
3. incorrect registry permission for the mailto handler