I just read the term "Shelfware" in the book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, by Eric S. Raymond. It is defined to be that shrink-wrapped software which is marketed well enough to sell, but quite worthless in practice.
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If I had all the dollars that I spent on ShelfWare back, I would be:
a) retired
b) wealthy
c) _________ (fill in)
d) all of the above.
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One good example occurred in the early 90's, the software to replace the Windows print manager and cause win 3.1 to print "blazingly fast". With a 386/16Mhz machine driving a 9-pin dot-matrix printer printing graphics, the speedup was not noticible. Lesson cost: $40.