I just spent half an hour with a very interesting task: I created a new user account on a computer of mine and configured Outlook. Why did that take me so long? Very simple: because apparently all Outlook add-in developers are completely crazy.

Outlook has several methods of registering add-ins. I’m not an expert, but I have found that at least there’s one method to register an add-in system-wide, another that registers the add-in only for a given user. So guess which approach every single add-in on my system uses? Right, the global one! Why? Sure – everybody who ever works on my system wants to try TEO because I have been trying TEO. And everybody has a NewsGator account because I have one. And so on. Sure.

There are ways to disable add-ins, and of course they are only accessible via the registry… of course this is more of a Microsoft problem. But the add-in writers are the ones who decide exactly how hard they want to make it – and in the case of the NewsGator guys they apparently circumvented the whole mechanism completely.

Josh even says it himself:

I’m sure there must be people out there who are able to follow that reasoning. I’m not one of them. Pardon my rant.