Re: "a tool Microsoft uses to hide its source code from being copied"
"Quite - databases are a far more scalable and sensible way of storing configuration informatino than flat text files."
How is the registry (which looks a lot like a directory tree) more "scalable" than a filesystem ? File systems have been capable of storing petabytes and running at Gigabytes/sec for over 15 years now, surely that should be enough for a bit of config...
FWIW one justification for the registry was that it could provide transactional consistency for the configuration data - which is nice in principle, but in practice I have not noticed a measurable improvement over the file model, YMMV.
"It doesnt run code from the registry. The registry entries are passed to Javascript as a process start up command."
Those two sentences are mutually exclusive.