just read the following in the book, "The Old New Thing" I imagine that Mr. Chen has a blog entry about it as well.

Anyway, often you'll hear, "I really with MS had put on the install disc" this is probably why they don't

Quote

Why isn't TWEAK UI included on the Windows CD?

WE TRIED THAT. It was a disaster.
In the original version of Windows 98, a copy of Tweak UI was placed in an Extras folder on the CD. And it didn't take long for us to realize that this was a bad idea.

Because there was no explicit download step, where you could see the Web page and read all the warnings, people just ran the program and started fiddling with their settings. Some time later, their computer would start acting strange, and they would call the product-support lines to get help. The product-support folks would spend hours trying to figure out what happened, only to discover that the users had actually done it to themselves. For example, they would go into Tweak UI's Control Panel page and hide some Control Panel icons. A few weeks later, they would get an error message that SAID something like, "Cannot connect to your printer. Please go to the Wireless Link Control Panel and check your settings." But when they went to the Control Panel, there was no Wireless Link icon.

The product-support people are smart, but they aren't psychic. There are hundreds of reasons why the Wireless Link icon might be missing from the Control Panel. It could be a corrupted file. It might be that the infrared port is not being detected by PLUG and Play. Maybe the user has the wrong infrared driver. Or the infrared port is incompatible. The printer might be positioned at the wrong angle, or the air might be too dusty to establish a good infrared connection.

Tweak UI hides the Wireless Link icon by using Group Policy, which is a technique that is used by corporations to apply settings to all computers in their organization. But if a home user calls the product-support line, the product-support people won't even bother looking into Group Policy settings because home users don't use Group Policy. Group Policy is for corporations.

Only after exhausting the most likely reasons will the product-support TECH- nician be likely to say,"Hmm, I know this is a home computer and Group Policy shouldn't be set, but let's go check it anyway." Then they'll find that the policy has been set to hide the Wireless Link icon. "Oh, yeah, a few months ago, I used that Tweak UI program to hide some icons I wasn't using. Was that wrong?" The product-support person politely walks the user through reenabling the Wireless Link icon via Group Policy and concludes the service call. Based on feedback from the product-support team, the Windows team realized that putting Tweak UI on the CD was a horrible mistake; and when Windows 98 was updated as Windows 98 SE, one of the files missing from the CD was Tweak UI.