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Re: Empty hive list in Registry Compactor (reference - "by Jan on Wed Feb 13, 2008 1 am")
I just downloaded 2008 beta and read the comments to date. I don't know if this will help you track the problem or not, but the item: "by Jan on Wed Feb 13, 2008 1 am," in which she provides an image of the Registry Compactor hive list that is empty, is an exact duplicate of the problem I found in jv16pt2007 (& reported via tech support). I run WinXP Home SP2 (2 updates only). I tried excluding the jv16pt.exe file from DEP monitoring and excluding it from AVAST scans, but nothing changed (I have not rebooted since those changes however - would that make a difference?)
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Re: 2008 - Burying config files way down under Docs & Settings (in a TEMP file? oops!)
Application Programmers (of which I was one before I retired) these days need to keep in mind that many, many users now use applications that image and restore their system drive/partition and therefore need provide a way for their apps to continue to work properly if an older C-drive-image is restored - that is, an easy way to either relocate or backup files that need to STAY at the CURRENT VERSION when an older C-image is restored. I don't use Firefox for this very reason; in my experience, it behaves badly with C-image restores.
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My Rant: more on burying the settings file...
I much prefer settings & data where they are easy to see and backup. A lot of us use disk-imaging these days, which means we restore older system partition images from time to time, which steps back in time, shutting down Windows and writing over every sector on partition C/system partition. I relocate any data that I don't want overwritten by the C-image-restoration (My Documents, email store, settings & configuration files, and certain application data, for example) to folders on my data partition, if an application is considerate enough to permit this. That way, a restore of a C-image does not affect my data, email, settings & configurations, etc., which are backed up separately from the C-images on other HDDs.
Of course I have to keep a few file backups cherry-picked from C for other applications that offer no relocation options. With jv16pt2007, I relocated the Settings folder, but decided everything else should match whatever version of the registry was restored with an image (any guidance here?). From the description of 2008, I will want to relocate pretty much all of the other folders from their buried position in Docs & Settings back to the program folder so I can look at them easily. I've always thought that the registry was fine for the OS, but that for single-user PCs (which is most of us), there should be a less-convoluted single-user OS that keeps an application's files together in it's program folder instead of flung all over the registry and everywhere else apparently - .ini files were SO much better - a change there could only mess up ONE application - and you knew WHERE everything was. That is the one thing I really miss about Win98SE.
You are welcome to edit this; I had to have my little one-time "registry rant" - sorry. I promise to be concise and stay on point in the future.
Ann
