I decided to install TweakVI today as I found TweakUI to be a very useful and stable product. Upon installing, it gave me the option to backup all of my systems' settings. After doing this, I thought a reboot was in order.

I was annoyed to find out that TweakVI had made changes to my system configuration without me asking. It had mucked up the "My Computer" view. It was now showing "dummy" blank files. These dummy files were quite a frustration seeing as I couldn't view their properties, or in fact, delete them. In addition to this, my Windows Experience Index was no longer displaying, and I was receiving random Explorer crashes.

I immediately reloaded my backed up configuration files, uninstalled TweakVI, and rebooted.

I was horrified to find out that these changes were made to my system configuration upon install before I was prompted to create a backup, and that the backup copies (supposedly made before TweakVI could damage anything) contained modifications.

For the best part, all the articles on the web that had covered this problem recommend changing the values from TweakVI - something that I really didn't want to do as it caused this mess in the first place.

However, I found a couple of articles that helped me clean up the mess left by TweakVI. (Fixing the performance index, Fixing the "dummy files")

I can't believe that a commercial software manufacturer that is recommended in so many reviews can make changes to my windows settings without my permission.

All I can hope is that their system test team has been sent to the wall. And of course that these are the only things that TweakVI has broken - only time will tell.