There's probably something good that could be said about the Windows registry, but I sure can't think of it. It looks like XP SP3 has been pushed out with a registry corrupting bug - interestingly enough, one that also cropped up for some people in SP2 (full dosclosure - I've never seen it). I think MS would be well advised to ditch the registry, and just let applications worry about keeping settings in any way that makes sense for them. It's not as if we have a disk space shortage at this point...