MSnumber1

The "concrete proof" that it was stupidly designed is that it fails so easily. It doesn't take a rocket scientist or someone who knows every detail about the registry to determine that if something is a crucial OS resource it shouldn't be able to become corrupted so easily. There is clearly no point in arguing with you since you seem to think there is nothing wrong with such a huge flaw.

If M$ would have designed the registry in a mindful manner they wouldn't have left it to developers to clean things up properly after a program is removed. They would have done well to require the use of a standard installation procedure that includes some sort of monitoring of what is changed in the registry by a program. This is the simplest solution I can think of and would eliminate the issue of programs leaving crap behind in the registry. You say "If it was that easy, wouldn't Microsoft have released a patch to change the way things work?" The answer is "No, we are talking about Microsoft here!" They won't fix something like this when they can easily ignore it in the short term. They know most users will not bother to install such a patch and they would also have to worry about backwards compatibility with the old broken registry. The point is, if the registry wasn't designed so stupidly, this would never be an issue. There are no other modern operating systems that will crash because some user installed too many programs. Now, I'm not saying you can mess up other operating systems, but it's much easier to mess up Windows, you just have to use it!

It's a moot point weather I have written a program with plugins support. The point is that the design of the registry was bad. It is an important resource and M$ should have written their operating system in a way that ensures that there is no corruption of such a crucial resource. If they are moving away from using the registry, more power to them. This doesn't change the fact that the registry as it exists on most people pc's is a major flaw in the system due to poor design on M$'s part.

No, it's definitely their fault if they allow a crucial OS resource to be corrupted. Let's quit making excuses for Microsoft here and get down to the root of the problem. Windows is Microsoft's product. The registry is a crucial part of that product. If Windows was half as good as they say it is, it would be able to ensure that the registry is kept in a healthy state. It's not unreasonable for consumers to want things to "just work." And from a technical standpoint it would not be too much work for Microsoft to ensure that programs don't mess up the registry. It's simply stupid that they let the registry get corrupted, and even stupider to try and blame it on anyone but Microsoft for that bad design.

I'm what you would call a power user. I use lots of programs and it can't be avoided. Every once in a while I'll try something new and not like it and then subsiquently uninstall it. It seems that this process of installing/uninstalling leads way to a fatal flaw in all Windows Operating Systems. I unfortunately do not have the luxary of being able to afford a 2nd machine just for experimentation with new software so I'm stuck with slowly screwing up my only desktop. It's extremely annoying to reinstall windows all the time! I know some linux guys and they have shown me reinstalling is much easy as you can keep all your programs since they are not dependent on a registry. maybe someone should come up with a program for people reinstalling windows that exports the entries for the programs you want to keep? Anyway, I'm seriously considering switching to linux now. As I see it, the only thing keeping me from doing it is games and it seems there are solutions out there now to play windows games in linux: http://www.transgaming.com/

Hey guys, every couple months M$ Winbloze crashes on me because my registry goes bad on me. I'm almost ready to give up on M$ and install Linux. Do you guys have any suggestions before I format my hard drive?