... addition, the user's profile stores the contents of her Start menu, the appearance of the desktop, and other look-and-feel settings. The profile's actually a composite of the data ... super-librarian; system components can look for their own configuration information in the Registry, then use what they find to control how they interact with other system components. The "important ... contents with the state of software, fonts, and other items actually loaded on the computer, so there was no guarantee that the Registry, the INI files, and the actual software loaded on the computer...