PopMan

Because I had to reinstall my system, I created an empty popman.ini in the popman folder and closed the program. All settings were writen to te ini-file, I backed it up, reinstalled my system, restored the ini and everything worked as before.

But when I deleted the ini file, it came back after I closed Popman. I expected Popman to write it's settings to the registry again, but it didn't! So it's ini-file once, ini-file always?

There is no "export settings to registry" feature because of 2 things:

- I never imagined that anyone would need it (why not just use the ini-file?!)
- It's a bit ugly to implement because registry storage is not 100% equivalent to ini storage (you need to know the data type when creating a registry value entry). Therefore, I can not use a generic routine, but would have to hard code it (which is a maintenance nightmare).

Christian wrote: - I never imagined that anyone would need it (why not just use the ini-file?!)

Aaaah ... finally, someone who understands it! I also coded some programs, Pick-a-Tag being the most known, and always users are asking "why not use the registry instead of the ini-file?". My standard reply always was "Why not use the ini-file?". I do think the ini-file has advantages. It doesn't clutter up any system (did you ever see "ini-cleaners" around, regcleaners enough!) and they're save and easy to use.

Anyway, thanks for your answer!

I think the answer is psychology; people think because they can't see any saved options (i.e. ini files) that less system resources are being used. In reality, it's probably a lot easier to keep ini files in check than it is the registry... hence your point about the number of registry cleaners you can find.