C# – Storing User Settings

"the app must be installable and uninstallable by any user" "all users share the same data files"

You're going to have trouble with having to meet both of these requirements. Vista's new security features are designed to keep users from trampling on each other (and on the system).

About the only way I can think of to make this work is a way similar to how we handled a requirement like that on a Windows 2000 environment. You build two components -- the user part of the app, and a system component that manages the information that's shared between the users. An admin installs the 'shared' component (which includes a windows service to run it), and each user installs the 'user' component.

I think that might work for your scenario, but it would require re-working your code that uses the shared files to talk to the service instead of accessing those files directly.

Of course, you could also just have a tool the user runs as an admin to create your folder in a specific place and grant the needed security permissions. That might work for your purposes as well.

If you will use the image in multiple places, then it's worth loading the image data only once into memory and then sharing it between all Image elements.

To do this, create a BitmapSource as a resource somewhere:

<BitmapImage x:Key="MyImageSource" UriSource="../Media/Image.png" />

Then, in your code, use something like:

<Image Source="{StaticResource MyImageSource}" />

In my case, I found that I had to set the Image.png file to have a build action of Resource rather than just Content. This causes the image to be carried within your compiled assembly.