11.1 What's Here and What's Not

Because the Registry is so dynamic, there's no possible way to capture the meaning of every key in a single document. As I write this, Microsoft is preparing to release a host of new Windows 2000-based products, each of which will have its own set of Registry keys and values. Quite apart from the proliferation of key is the problem of what configuration a particular machine has. What software's on it? Which service pack? Is it part of a network? Does it run any server products?

As if Microsoft products alone weren't enough of a problem, there's an ongoing flood of third-party products running on Win32--web servers, Usenet news servers, CAD tools, office applications--and they all have their own keys.

So, the first confession I have to make is that this chapter is incomplete. By design, it doesn't include information about keys that aren't part of either the core Windows 2000 or NT 4.x operating systems: no BackOffice components, no Netscape servers, no nothing. Instead, it covers only the most interesting keys found in ordinary networked installations of Windows 2000 Server and NT Server 4.0.

The good news is that the pages you're looking at now represent a small subset of what's documented about the Registry. Because of space and time limitations, I had to choose the most important keys and document them here.

This chapter, then, is like a traveler's foreign-language phrase book. It doesn't teach you every word of the language, but it does teach you the most important words and phrases. (I wonder what the Registry equivalent of "Where is the bathroom?" would be?)