My theory is that given the security issues XP has had, Microsoft has gone for a complete rewrite with the same look and feel, but all new guts. In a way, Apple has done this too - the key is gradually giving up any hope of backward compatibility, so Vista has to be compatible with XP and maybe 2000, but no further back. That's a pile of work to a system that has layers of patches like an onion.

Yes, there have been talks about phasing out the registry as well, which would be nice IMHO. Applications should run like in OS X and in Unix, where every resource an application needs in located in that applciations folder. One thing I like about OS X over MS Windows is that.

And one of the greatest advantages of that is drag and drop installs/uninstalls. with the exception of a few harmless (since nothing will read them and they can't interfere with others) pref files, nothing is left when you trash an app installed by d&d.

Yup, it is pretty nice. There are like a few advantages of having a registry, configuration wise, but overall I would like to see it completely go away.

The benefits of not having one seem to out weigh what little benefits you get from it.

Even an alternative method for storing where an application should find stuff would be an improvement - then an app's registry insertions couldn't collide with the registry list of another.

Microsoft also said that Office 2007 is going to be late.

From wikipedia.

I got a real kick out of the original release date.