Who Thought That Was a Good Idea?

I accidentally disabled the webcam microphone today while trying to straighten out the settings on the various sound-input devices. The webcam disappeared from the list of devices, and I couldn't figure out how to make it come back. After much fussing around, I learned from an online search that in Windows 7, you have to right-click in a blank area of the recording devices screen and select "show disabled devices." How would anyone actually know to do this? It seems like a terrible idea to me. But anyway, when I did so, the webcam reappeared and I re-activated it.