I’d just like to say one thing to all the application developers out there:

Stop bloating my registry

Windows can crawl at times as it is, without ‘professional’ software
developers leaving their crap behind when I uninstall an application.
When I uninstall a piece of software, I do it because I don’t intend on
using it any more. Which means I don’t want its settings left all over
my computer ‘just in case’ I choose to install it again.

At least give me the option to choose whether to keep the settings in my registry, just in case I decide to install the application later.

One thing I cannot understand is why developers insist on writing
unnecessary values to the registry anyway. The registry is a shared
repository of configuration and other metadata. Surely if an
application doesn’t need to share its settings, it could store them in
a good old-fashioned plaintext configuration file?