On 31/10/2012 03:01 AM, Patrick Elliott wrote:
> On 10/30/2012 1:46 AM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>>> Still, even something like,
>>> "Export all keys specific to this application.", would have been nice.
>>
>> What makes you think you can't do that?
>>
> It can't. To do that would require exporting "all linked keys". That
> means that you search for, say, Explorer, and you don't get get the key
> "USER-Explorer-...", you also get the 5-6 hexidecimal keys for its
> components, keys in other sections, which relate, etc. You have to know
> what all of them are, and either mark them yourself, or export them each
> separately, as far as I can tell. And, just searching for what key you
> need is a pain in the ass sometimes (especially if it turns out that the
> specific thing you are looking for is one of those "hidden" settings,
> which is not normally in the registry at all, nor documented any place
> obvious, no accessible through any of the user menus).

Grabbing all the keys related to one application is usually easy enough. 
Figuring out what all that stuff /means/? Yeah, not so easy. And finding 
all the settings that get changed for /other/ programs when you install 
the application (e.g., registering COM servers, changing the system 
search path, hooking into the Windows Explorer context menus, etc.) is 
not easy at all...

Then again, there are tools for monitoring the registry and recording 
changes to it. It still won't help you figure out what the changes 
/mean/, but it makes it fairly easy to capture them.

(My personal favourite is how changing from the lame "Windows XP" theme 
to the sane "classic theme" doesn't just change one registry key that 
says "theme name" or something - it actually changes eighty bazillion 
keys all over the registry. Consequently, it's absolutely impossible to 
script the damned thing!)

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