All is not well in the Windows "Add/Remove Programs" control panel

You may have noticed that the Add/Remove Programs control panel changed from Windows 2000 onward. Now it takes an age to open and displays extra information like the size of the program and how recently you used it. Look closer, though, and you'll see that that information is often very wrong. The explanation is that that information mostly results from a nasty hack. (From oldnewthing, an invaluable source of knowledge for Windows programmers.)