...and she was going to use every legal means at her disposal to get it.
If the producers could have imposed a time limit on her without breaking the rules at the time, goodness knows they would have.
Key concepts like these are things I think people like someguy23475 overlook in favor of simply complaining because complaining is easier.
As irritating as I'm sure Kati Knudsen's run was to all involved--think about it, would
you have wanted to be anywhere in that studio after listening to the same music looping for all that time on a single player?--anything they could've done differently in the moment would've been an instant S&P issue. Here's why--not only would they have failed to act in accordance with the rules they did (and didn't) give the contestants, they would have also been (rightly) called out in legal forums for singling out one contestant and interfering with their deliberative process. It would also be a rather stark example of changing the rules in the middle of the game, which after the whole Quiz Show scandal, I could see coming with substantial legal liabilities.
I'm 100% sure that like any other gameshow host, especially ones with that much money on the line as the top prize, are given strict rules of engagement for what they can and can't do. (Would be interesting to hear from someone like MSTieScott if I'm right about that as far as PiR is concerned.) In Regis' case, I'm betting that because contestants at the time were said to be given an unlimited amount of time to reach their decision, he was told to just be patient and indulge the person in the Hot Seat for however long it took them to make up their minds. It was more or less inevitable that someone would come along and take "unlimited time" to an unintended extreme, which is exactly what Kati Knudsen did.
It's comparable to the Michael Larsen situation--he abided by the rules of the game, and because of that there was nothing they could do, however much I'm sure someone wanted to. Even the idea of not letting him come back for a second day fit with the rules, since there was a winnings cap in place at the time. It was only afterwards that they could make rule patches to prevent it from happening again.