Agreed. The windows registry was the stupidest idea ever spawned. I also agree there should be a minimum configuration option that is tuned for high resource requirement programs like games. (I do a periodic tune-up on my gaming system that essentially does this but it is not a trivial task nor one for the techno-challenged.)
An don't even get me started about using Windows as a business class OS..........
There's an interesting interview with Tony Williams, one of the inventors of the registry, in which he talks about how the registry came about because of COM.
His first slide in one of the earlier presentations was something along the lines of "The Registry: Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry...".
He also expresses amazement at how dependent the _KERNEL_ has become on the registry.
For those not familiar with COM, I suggest having a look at what it is, and that should give you a good idea of why the registry was viewed as a good solution to the problems COM throws up.
Don't be too quick to condemn it, it actually serves a useful purpose.