A special key combination used to soft reboot machines running MS-DOS or OS/2. The same combination is used to login to Windows NT or to kill the current task on Windows 9x. On Linux PCs this combination is often tied to the shutdown command. These three keys are used because it's very difficult to hit all three accidentally.

That would be Ctrl+Alt+Del, for the Windows tech writer.

Microsoft Windows documentation has tried to offer a new standard way of describing keystrokes in text; it hasn't really converted many people, perhaps because few people who use Windows think of the mouse as an optional device.

The Ctrl-Alt-Del in NT/2k is for security, actually. You can define the login program to run at boot and that could contain some trojan, so microsoft set winnt up to run %WINDIR%\login.exe every time, and the executable must be digitally signed by M$ to run.

So, this all means to you that if your NT box is going down, then at least you know that the l33t h4x0r who did had enough money to pay m$ to sign his program. :)

(Actually, Microsoft will test the program out (highly skilled staff:) before they OK it.)

One of the other features of the Ctrl+Alt+Delete to login is that is the apparent login box is actually a trojan horse running in user space, Windows NT will display the logout box when the user press Ctrl+Alt+Delete instead of the expected login box. My personal opinion is that this is a rather nice feature.