It was a good idea once-upon-a-time and may well still be. As usual, the problem with the Registry in Windows is largely Microsoft's implementation of it. Back when all it contained was OLE application information, all was peachy because the structure wasn't too deep and the resulting binary file wasn't too big. I suspect that someone got carried away at some point about the possibilities of this hierarchical storage mechanism for numbers and fragments of text. Unfortunately, they didn't upgrade the back-end storage properly. And then they got carried away with the heirarchy. This the current crashing mess.

OS/2 has a number of binary information files. I don't know as much about them but I do recall they were not as big a hassle under OS/2 probably because IBM did a better job of matching the backend to their purpose (IIRC there are several more of them than in Windows). Plus the fact that OS/2 remained with a thoroughly plain-text CONFIG.SYS.

Wade.