That's probably a reasonable retort. My response was to the claims that we aren't addressing the technical issues with the registry -- that is, if Microsoft wa

That's probably a reasonable retort. My response was to the claims that we aren't addressing the technical issues with the registry -- that is, if Microsoft was unable/unwilling to handle registry hygiene, what hope the rest of us? I have not run the same test on a modern OS / Office install and uninstall, but at the risk of exposing my biases, I'm not hugely optimistic. Tangential aside - at the time I was working with a large Australian telco where we'd developed a SOE with robust roaming plus (effectively) package management for ~1500 desktop applications on a Microsoft Windows 3.x platform, all of which was largely kiboshed by the introduction of the registry. Secondly, I feel I've already addressed your 'at least it's not as bad as the /etc mess' by pointing out that /etc is not a mess on some, perhaps all, GNU/Linux distros with a good package management system. To paraphrase - if your argument relies on how slackware handled /etc in the late 90's, I don't know if that's worth anything today.