"why the registry prejudice?"

I have a few things that I don't like about the approach, althought they are mostly out of a user's perspecitve.

1. Comments
2. Unreadable
3. Multi platform problem

1. With text files, it's easy to comment a certain value out. This way, you will keep the old value, while you can try a new value. Besides the altering, I like some explanation in configuration files anyway: "This value is used for yadayadayada". With the registry approach, you can of course alter values too, but either you should have a good memory, or write every old value down somewhere, in case you ever want to return to the old value.

2. Maybe it's just me, but I find it terribly hard to find where exactly an app. stores its configuration, due to the massive ammount of data that is all located in one place. It can take quite a bit of time to finally locate the "folder" (or whatever it is called) with the configuration options.

3. As I stated, I already have a working app. targeted for *NIX systems, which don't have a registry. Hacking the registry support in, would make no sense for the *NIX systems and only add problems (if I decide to add one option to the config file, I would have to make sure the registry would get that change too, which I am likely to forget, for I don't use a win32 system myself).