The general issue one runs into on Windows where you, say, install a bunch of dev tools and then, at some point, your registry gets corrupted and you find yourself needing to reinstall everything.

If you run your tools, and do your testing, inside of VMs, you can quickly "restart" from a known good state.

The Windows Registry is a lot like /etc in Unix-like environments. In either case, all that configuration can get co-mingled and corrupted and you have to start over.

VMs are a great way to solve that problem for developers.

Registry corruption since w2k is pretty much solved. It's a database with a WAL-style transaction log. If registry corruption is something that happens to you more than once, I'd check the storage since there's probably a lot more that's getting corrupted... Otherwise - keep full disk backups.

Chucking and restarting a VM is a lot faster than dealing with full disk backups.

Registry corruption isn’t just about transactional integrity. It’s also about whether or not something got misconfigured along the way and now you have to go figure it out. Or end up trying to uninstall and reinstall a bunch of stuff.

I’d rather just be able to start over from scratch.

All this work to treat our servers like cattle, but we insist on treating our clients like pets. Your local client should be just as replaceable as your servers.

It’s not so much corruption, it’s that every app uses it a little bit differently and half of them aren’t good at cleaning it up on uninstall. You can still get the system into a bad state where a rebuild (especially if you don’t have a lot of dependencies) is easier than trying to untangle whatever app or script or driver borked something.

I’ve experienced registry getting bloated and it is terrible for data restoration. I can’t think of any meaningful similarity between windows registry and Unix /etc. I’ve experienced orphaned config files but no other real issues. The orphaning is intentional usually because the config file has been changed from the default.