Tweaking Windows is something that a lot of Windows users love to do, and with every fresh install the first thing done is to install one’s favorite tweaking program and fine-tune Windows to your liking. There is nothing wrong with that, even though many of the most well known ones are questionable as to their benefit.

Over the years I have tried many tweaking programs, and even wrote one of my own years ago. For the most part the developers of these tweaking programs are a conscientious bunch, who make doubly sure that the tweaks they are suggesting are safe. However, with each new version of Windows there are some tweaks that will no longer work, and in some cases previous tweaks can actually turn out to have a negative impact.

It is no different with Windows 7, as one of the most popular Windows tweaks can actually break a new feature of the new OS. The tweak I am referring to is the one that removes the shortcut arrow overlay that you see on your desktop icons for installed applications.

This has always been one of the most popular tweaks for all versions of Windows since the arrow icon overlay was first introduced. Just about every single tweaking program I have seen has this as one of their stock tweaks and not a single registry tweaking site would miss out in having this on their list of must have tweaks.

The problem is that in Windows 7 using this tweak will totally disable the new feature of being able to pin applications to the taskbar and the Start Menu. I am not sure why this happens, but I ran smack headlong into it when I used the shortcut arrow tweak on my install of Windows 7.

It took a couple of days before I discovered the options Pin To Taskbar and Pin to Start Menu were missing from all the context menus. It wasn’t until I did a search as to why this would be happening that I found out about the effect that the once safe tweak had on my new install of Windows 7.

Luckily, I found a solution for the problem, which I wrote up in a post titled What the hell happened to the Pin to Taskbar option? but the obvious lesson learned is that with any new version of Windows, it isn’t wise to blindly accept that all the previous version tweaks will work for the new version.

More importantly – and this is directed at developers of tweaking programs (and some very well known ones at that) before you ship a tweak out for a new version of Windows, make damn sure that you know without a shadow of a doubt that it won’t have a detrimental effect.

[Cross-posted at Winextra]