Matt McIrvin's Freaky Alternate Reality

I have gone from being a competent compugeek to being a complete moron, thanks to software which has the same drawbacks as the XM satellite radio you mentioned. The problem I have is that a shareware program or product touts itself as being a "CD ripper" or "automatic Usenet posting device" or whatever, but when you install it, there is no obvious way to do that one thing you downloaded it for. The exceptions to this rule are usually substandard products that go too far to the other extreme. PuTTY is the only really good mid-level program I have that allows some tweaking but is also plug-and-play enough that you can use it without a single tweak.