Classic Shell: Forum

Install of 4.1.0 on new laptop win8.1 with GPT disk made:
Keys added: 30,037 Values added: 32,803
I track all installs. I did not install Classic Explorer. I did not install as Admin.
I had almost the same exact results installing the 4.20 beta. Since then I recovered an image.
I would say that 80 to 90% of the Keys are under >> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\DRIVERS\DriverDatabase\DeviceIds\
On my regular desktop win8.1 with MBR disk the same install made 257 reg keys.
An old install of v3.6.7 on the regular desktop when using win8 made 25,700 reg keys.
Thanks for any suggestions.

That doesn't look right. The installer should not touch anything in HKLM\DRIVERS. It adds few keys in HKLM\SOFTWARE and some in CLSID. There should be a few dozen registry changes in total.

How are you observing this? Is it possible you are running multiple installers at the same time? Maybe you plugged in a device and it is silently installing its drivers? Or maybe you are running the installer from an external disk or from the network, and some drivers need to be set up just to run the EXE from that location?

Look at the newly created keys and try to guess from the names or the contents what device they belong to.

I track installs with InCtrl. I have used it for a great many years. I installed from the main HDD on both the laptop and on the desktop.
I am definitely not running multiple installers. I am certain that on yesterday's install that I did not plug or unplug *anything* during the install.
The only thing plugged into a USB port was the mouse. I am not connected to a network.

The great majority of Keys under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\DRIVERS\DriverDatabase\DeviceIds\ are for PRINTERS.
I installed a printer 2 days ago. That install did not make any keys under \DeviceIds\ .
The printer (wired only) was Not connected during the install of Classic Shell.

When I installed 4.20 Beta (29,000 Keys) a month ago (I have recovered an image since) the Keys were also mostly for PRINTERS.
I did Not have a printer installed at that time.
On the beta install I installed from a USB stick that had been used on the laptop a lot.

(InCtrl does not fully work on win8.1 since it does not read 2 sections of the registry.)
Thanks for your reply.

The installer is writing mostly to these keys:
HKLM\Software\IvoSoft
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKCR\CLSID
HKCR\AppID

Anything else is done by Windows Installer itself, or some unrelated software.
BTW, Windows Installer creates a checkpoint before installing the software. Maybe that's what you are seeing. You can disable it by adding MSIFASTINSTALL=1 to the command line of the installer EXE: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd408005(v=vs.85).aspx
If that's not it, and you are still interested to figuring it out, I would run a tool like Process Monitor to see what exact registry keys are written to and by which process.

Very interesting. I will look further. Thank you greatly for your time and knowledge.

I have had a few other apps make enormous numbers of reg keys.