Application wide settings and other application wide (or should I say computer wide) data can be in Program Files. But user data can’t. The whole idea of profiles is to make them private to the user. They have to tasks.

1. To protect the data from other users
2. To make the data user specific

If everything would be in the Program Files then users could not have their separate data. Ok it could be solved with user specific subfolders (mini profiles per application), but then you have an even greater fragmentation of data and even more problems with security.

The model itself regarding the separation of data is good, but the VirtualStore implementation is not. Otherwise we seem to agree that VirtualStore is more of a manace than actual help.

There are other ways around it, such as not installing to Program Files, or changing the permissions on that apps folder before running it.

I don’t agree with the premise that apps should not write to Program Files. I have several apps that I can just backup their entire folder and the app can be moved to another computer (no dependent files). Having the app files in one place and data in another is retarded sometimes.

For example, what if I want to distribute a database that the user will then be able to modify. I have to jump through hoops to copy it to somewhere else and so forth.

My apps folder should belong to my app.

So would crashing applications, but at least the crashing application failure is noisy, and can be fixed (by people who are not afraid to modify file system write permissions). This failure is silent, until your data is gone.

Imagine you save your file, then open it from another application, with the same absolute location (“C:\foo\bar\bat.txt”) and depending on which application you open it with, you get two completely different file content, or two almost identical files, with different content.

It’s an IT nightmare.

W