>Ed:
>How much info will the Registry hold? With a 9 Gig HD on my personal system, if every application that I install used the Registry, would it fill up, get slow, etc? I know that when I install VB, there are tons of entries to the Registry. I think I remember trying to install some app and was told that I needed to remove some entries from the Registry. I am getting old and my memory isn't what it once was. I THINK, I had both VFP & VB 5.0 installed on the system and was trying to install Visual Studio 6.0. Does this make sense?
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I believe that NT won't let it grow to more than 25% of the allocated swap space size. Even when it gets big (mine is in the 11-12MB range on this machine at the moment) it's at least as fast as INI file access would be. And it doesn't rely on pathing, drive mapping or anything else.

It boiuls down to your personal philosophy of things. MS's intent was to at least keep station-specific and user-specific information in various registry keys; since it isn't in a text file form, it's easy to put widely variable data types in, and the hierarchical reference system is easy to work with IMO. Some people don't like the registry; there's nothing inherently wrong with using INI files or configuration databases (and I do both at times) to store configuration data. In many cases, I'll put a reference to the desired configuration database in the user's HKEY_CURRENT_USER hierarchy, and machine-specific configuration detail in another key somewhere in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.

It's your app, so its your choice.

>There is file here on UT called iniloader (or something close) that MAY have been written by George Tasker. I dl'ed it, but I ended up writing a Delphi App and calling it from VFP to display the info I wanted from the INI file. I did not need to read an INI file and use an item in it to make my VFP app work properly.
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>Mike