>It's reading the information from the BIOS (I think) on startup. These days the cluster size really isn't a big issue given the low cost of large hard drives. It's of realitively little importance. Further, cluster size is valid only on the local machine (if it's being reported correctly, which it isn't always). A network OS, such as Novell may report back that the cluster size is 32K, when in reality it's much smaller.

I see the point on this specific issue. More generally, have you run into other properties/system information of this type that developers might want to know but are not able to access through the API and do you have thoughts as to why they (MS) would not provide a hook to it?

For myself, I needed to get the processor clock rate thru an ActiveX control I developed and used some inline assembler code from another developer that effectively "calculates" the clock rate, since there was so "direct" route ( when I wrote the control ) to this information through the API w/o going through the WMI, which looked like a pain in the neck at the time. :-)

In light of this thread, I was wondering as to the (MS) thought process as to why access to certain pieces of info would be restricted and was interested if you have any thoughts on this.