I’ve got a V440 bluetooth laser mouse. It’s the nicest mouse I’ve ever had. And it works great with Windows Vista — associate it with the computer once and it just works.

I don’t know what possessed me, but I installed the craplets that came with the mouse: it pops up a demented dialog box when I log in, disconnects the mouse, and makes me go associate the mouse again.

My mouse works perfectly without the craplets — why does Logitech ship it? They must be spending millions on tech support calls and returns because of problems caused by the useless software they ship. The economic carnage their software inflicts on us must be much worse: I’ve seen more than one Windows installation totaled by input device craplets.

Somebody ought to get a restraining order against Logitech against including useless software with their hardware.

Last week I got a wireless game controller from Logitech — once again, it’s a great piece of hardware and I plugged it into my Mac Mini with no problems. My son, however, took a shine to the mini-CD included in the box and wanted to put it the slot CD drive… Which would have jammed it, putting the mac out of commission as a DVD player… Who knows what kind of mischief it would have done had I installed it on a Windows machine?

In addition to the dangers of cigarettes and lead-painted toys from China, my 5 year old now has to hear that putting disks that come with hardware you buy can wreck your computer.