R – How to make a Delphi control panel applet be non-‘legacy’

In Vista, your program is NOT allowed to write to the program files directory where your program is located.

You now have to save your ini files in the AppData directory.

A description of how to do this in delphi is at: http://www.theabsolute.net/sware/delphivista.html#datafolder

And to be Vista/Windows 7 compatible, the rest of that web page will be a good guideline.

For your update, you cannot CreateDir more than 1 level deep at once. Use the ForceDirectories function instead:

    path:=AppDataPath+'\MyCompanyName\ProductName\'; 
    if NOT DirectoryExists(path) then
      ForceDirectories(path);

p.s. Don't be afraid to write program settings to the Registry. That's what the registry is for. In fact, it properly handles settings for different users for you when different users are logged in. The Registry works in the same way in 98/Vista/7. Whereas ini files have actually been depreciated, and are no longer used by Windows.

You say you don't want to mess with the registry because "every little bit you add to it, slows down the computer just that much more". Actually that is NOT true. The registry is simply a database. And if it is 10 MB or 100 MB, the difference in time it takes to access is imperceptable.

It's all those companies selling Registry Cleaner programs that are trying to keep this fairy tale going. Using their cleaners can do you more harm than good. All they need to do is wipe out one or two important entries and you can be in deep doo-doo. Please read this article about Registry Cleaners, and especially the "Marginal performance benefit" section which explains correctly that the problems Windows 98 and earlier had with the Registry have been mostly fixed.

If your program adds more than 2 or 3 KB to the Registry, that will be a lot, and it is an insignificant amount. Use the registry. Do it right.

There's not much to say here. Type library importing is a recurring problem area. Sometimes old versions of Delphi will import the libraries when new versions will not. And sometimes vice versa, as you have encountered. The type library importer has bugs, that's the long and the short of it.

Your workaround is the most effective way to deal with such problems. There's no point submitting a QC report because the problem is fixed in the latest version.