Thomas, I'm debating the usefulness of registry as a centralized, binary storage of system/application configuration and I'm much less interested in yet another Windows vs Unix war.

My previous post could be shorter: if you want a binary tree-like storage, it already exists and it's called the file system. Each OS has one, and it is standard, comes with a bunch of tools, is familiar to users. Thus I just don't get why Microsoft felt the need for implementing yet another proprietary FS (registry), especially when it's inferior to NTFS or Ext3 in every way, including security, reliability and performance. Perhaps it made sense in FAT/Win16 days.

But I hear you, good tools can be misused and bad ones can be improved upon