Accessing Windows resources ...

Windows Resources can be files or registry entries which are essential for the working of the operating system. Typically these are files in system32 and registry keys in HKLM. I have seen a lot apps muck with them to have a strange way to operate. Mainly application setup have seen to be broken as they are not able to install a system binary or overwrite a system reg key.

If your app relies on changing or editing any of these resources, it will have issues running on Windows Vista due to the Windows Resource Protection (replacing the old file protection in earlier windows). You can get tons of info on this on the web.

But going forward it’s a good practice not to depend on such resources, as these will get more and more secure. In an ideal world any of the resources used by the OS should be transparent to the application.