Active Desktop

Often when my parent's computer crashes (It's running Windows ME which accounts for most of them.) it replaces the desktop picture, of my brother Matthew standing by a canon, with a warning that says: "Your computer crashed, Active desktop (Which shows the desktop picture.) has been turned off, incase it was the cause of the problem."

I have two thoughts on that:

1) Why is a picture being displayed by Active desktop? Active Desktop is used to display web pages as a background, so why is it used to display a JPG file?

2) If Active Desktop is unstable enough that it is often automatically disabled when Windows crashes, was it ready to be part of a shipping OS?