Respectfully noted.

Sadly, yes. Even if I hadn't, I was still the kid who was called in to fix things when PCs equipped with these "operating systems" had problems. Re-installing was sort of fun at first, but the joke gets old when repeated enough. And anyway, it's the kind of joke where someone chops my leg off with an axe and has a good laugh about it. Dismissing it as "oh theyre just being boys" is hardly an excuse.

Hatred is indeed what I felt first, however that's gone long since. What's left is distrust and disappointment.

And, I have tried going back to Windows every once in a while. (I admit though I haven't tried 7 yet). Every time I try, I feel sad and disappointed (not the least because I'm usually forced to pay for the license to get the hardware I want). XP was/is ok, but it's starting to get old already. Vista was/is ok, it's just too slow, no matter what I do with it. I got better things to do than to wait my HD led turn off.

Well I like telling how things should be in my opinion.

ndi, you actually nailed a lot of reasons why I think the registry, as it exists today, has gone bad. I'll add some more.

* Using registry to store preferences makes moving settings of some application from one PC to other a pain.

* Using registry to store preferences makes saving a version of settings of some application, and restoring them later, annoying.

* Using registry to store preferences gives an application enough rope to hang itself so properly, that advanced registry surgeon skills are necessary to get it running again.

As I said, it's not bad at idea level. For Win Phone 7, it might actually work as they have no legacy apps to support.

However, I think that currently on MS desktop OSs, it is just too complicated and too easily broken, for the amount of goodness it brings. Sadly, due to all the application legacy, many of the issues will be unfixable in the foreseeable future.

For some reason, I see nothing wrong with good old plain text config files, for application specific settings. They're robust, simple, and easily fixed when things go wrong. For OS settings, maybe some centralized DB is necessary, to allow the applications to access it in controlled manner.

But, IMHO the biggest fail with registry, is the fact that it's the system and user configurations mixed together. It's just too hard to tell things apart after they've taken the blender round together.

I shall end my thread de-railing efforts now, as I'm actually interested to see quality discussion on the topic at hand.