Should you ever allow a "Miscellaneous" category or section or tab or page in your application? When dividing your data up into different sections, do you always have a place for everything or do you have a place for most things and then everything else goes into the catch all "Miscellaneous" section?

Some applications use "Configuration" or "Options" to try and solve this problem. Visual Studio 2008 uses a "General" section:

"General" is not quite miscellaneous, but almost. These options don’t really seem to fit in the other subcategories of "Edit and Continue", "Just In Time", "Native", or "Symbols". So that at least seems to mean that they need their own section.

Firefox uses the same pattern in their Advanced section:

These options are at least grouped into sections, but they still don’t seem to fit into any of the other categories.

Outlook 2007 on the other hand has an "Other" tab:

This may as well have been called "General" as well. There’s no rhyme or reason as far as I can tell for the sections inside of "Other".  Looks like another case of "Miscellaneous" to me.

In the fields of Information Architecture and Usability, a method known as card sorting is used to have potential users sort terms and labels according to how they would logically group them, in whatever order that might be.

In many cases, the users have a leftover category that they might simply label "Miscellaneous". Is this ok or is this just another usability issue to deal with and redesign later? Should "miscellaneous" never ever be allowed? Does inclusion of a miscellaneous category mean that your data isn’t organized in a intuitive way? Or will inclusion of a miscellaneous category just lead to users hunting around all the similarly titled sections until they finally check miscellaneous?

Or is that just too much of a Platonic ideal? Are there times where some fields simply don’t fit anywhere else? At some point do we need to throw up our hands and allow the wave of meaningless titles and labels flow?