Don't know if this is useful or if you know about it, but here's a link to a description of GConf, a library that is meant to "leapfrog" over the concept of a "Registry". It seems to have some useful features and it might be nice to think about possibly going into compliance with it w/piper if we are pretty well gnomified. http://developer.gnome.org/feature/current/index.html Deanne Taylor Biophysics Graduate Program lilyth at umich.edu University of Michigan http://www.umich.edu/~lilyth Ann Arbor