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From: mmshah@athena.mit.edu (Milan M Shah)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Re: How to clean WIN.INI and WINDOWS directory?
Message-ID: <1991Apr26.002159.23869@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 26 Apr 91 00:21:59 GMT
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WRT win.ini getting full of junk from programs that you have tried and
then deleted, (and at the risk of sounding holier than thou :-)
I would like to say that the best way to attack the problem
is to prevent it. Win 3.0 has excellent facilities for each program to 
maintain its own .ini file. Thus most programs should not touch win.ini at
all. In fact, using your own private .ini file is as simple as modifying
just a couple of function calls. An added benefit is that these .ini files
are much shorter, so finding key-value pairs is much faster.

Unfortunately, this requires work from the programmer, and the user can do
little about it. If a commercial program did this cloberring up of win.ini,
I would definitely complain to the manufacturer. At this point, I can see
no need for an application to use win.ini at all. Moreover, the private
.ini file should reside with the program module, and not require that it
be present in the windows directory. This can be implemented with just a
couple of extra system calls (to determine where the program was launched
from). If anyone needs code to see how to use private .ini files, I would
be more than happy to oblige.

Milan
.