Writing dumb little programs to automate some trivially annoying task is one of my favorite things to do. I get to play around with UI design, or build some hideous monstrosity out of reflection and polymorphic generic classes. I get to play with parts of the language I don't normally use. Who cares if it's ugly or slow? It runs once a week, it doesn't matter so long as it works.

I wouldn't really call these programs useless, but I could definitely live without them. The way I like to think about it is making little programs that make my computer suck less.