Windows Vista only: Similar-to-TweakUI application Ultimate Windows Tweaker adds more tweaks, bugfixes, and better 64-bit support to an already ridiculously useful tool for making configuration changes the easy way.
We’ve featured this application here before, but the initial release had some stability problems (especially for 64-bit users). The latest version fixes those issues and adds a bunch of new tweaks to make your tweaking tasks just a little bit easier, including more personalization, UAC, performance, and network tweaks. The already-tech-savvy might notice that most of these tweaks are available through registry hacks or complicated dialogs, but this application is designed to put every setting into one easily accessible location—and since the utility doesn't require installation it makes for a handy addition to your flash drive toolkit.
Ultimate Windows Tweaker is a free download for Windows Vista users only. Most Lifehacker readers using XP are probably already using Microsoft’s TweakUI utility to customize their system.
Pinning a Show Desktop icon to the taskbar in Windows 7 won’t work the way it did in pretty much every earlier version of Windows. While you can still create the “Show Desktop.scf” script, it just won’t pin itself correctly. The Tweaking with Vishal blog offers a kind of work-around that makes use of Windows 7′s utterly transparent toolbars.