Registry stuff

Hello. Maybe I should put this in the Blitzmax section since thats what I'm using, but what I'm asking about I guess can relate to any flavour of Blitz.

Right then. I'm working on some software at the moment (nothing malicious) that I'd like to be able to store a certain amount of information for in the system registry.

On top of that, I don't want the user to be able to easily locate and modify that information. Forget about reg monitors - there's nothing that can be done to stop them seeing what gets sent to registry - I'm talking about making it difficult for Average Joe.

Are there any good tutorials on getting started with registry use?

Where is safe to store information to? Any locations that are frowned upon?

And what of Vista access? Any known restrictions?

Don't know about Vista, but the generally safe places seem to be HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software (for every user) and HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software (for user specific settings.) Using the other locations for storing just data is somewhat taboo. Some locations are sort-of temporary, some are used to store file-type mappings, some are used to set hardware configuration.

If you want to confuse average Joe a little, name it under something that doesn't relate to your company or program name, but make it look legitimate. If you create your own folders here, you can pretty much do what you want in them. I honestly doubt though that this will defeat average Joe, because average Joe can search for cracks or whatever in Google, and non-average Joe is going to beat this stuff really easily.

It's probably easier to defeat Joe by storing the data in the System folder under some obscure filename than the registry. There's also the wonderful mess of Program Files/Common Files to hide stuff in. All of these things are pretty easy to figure out though.