There's a lot in the Registry and much of it is
neither well-designed nor well-arranged. That's to
say, knowing the general layout doesn't necessarily
tell you very much.
An author named John Woram wrote a very good
Registry book in the past. I don't think he's still
writing, but if you could find a copy of his book for
*any* Windows version it would tell you a lot of the
basics.
The 3 main relevant keys are:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT - Contains information about how to deal
with files based on file extension. Below that it contains
a list of classes or "ProgID"s. That's for COM. Basically, it's
a large index of components on your machine that Windows
can use to find a needed component. That in itself is a very
long story.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE - Contains various information about
the hardware drivers, software configuration, Windows setup,
etc. If you browse through there you'll get the general idea.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER - Contains information about the currently
logged on user. It's the personal version of HKLM.
The Registry is designed, in large part deliberately,
to be very disorganized and confusing. If you try hard to get
Windows to be just the way you want it, you'll quickly find
that a great deal of that project involves finding and setting
very obscure Registry values. That arrangement keeps most
people from changing their PC setup. That means MS has
less support costs and it also means that corporate system
administrators can feel confident that the workers they supervise
are unlikely to ever figure out how to configure Windows in the
way they want it.
A good example of that is Internet Explorer
settings. AOL has historically removed whole Registry keys in
order to remove tabs from the Internet Options window that they
don't want people to discover. They can do that! And of course,
very few people do discover those tabs missing. In case they do,
there's also a setting in HKLM that will allow someone who knows
about it (AOL or your system admin.) to let you change settings
in Internet Options but cause them to have no effect, because
they'll be overridden by settings in HKLM!
That example is just a very tiny part of the breathtaking -
and partially deliberate - disorganization and lack of centralization
in the Registry.
> i need to become proficient in the understanding of the workings of the
> registry. keeping in mind that i am a newbie, what sources are available
that
> do not explain an enigma in terms of a conundrum, and are not written by
> authors who belong in a straight jacket?
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