Way ahead of you, Ray

Raymond Chen, Microsoft programmer extraordinaire, warns us all:

If your program assumes that strings in the registry are always null-terminated, then you can be tricked into a buffer overflow if you happen across a non-null-terminated string. (For example, if you use strcpy to copy it around.)

(Note: I'm not going to get into whether it should have been possible to get into this state in the first place. I didn't design the registry. Arguing about the past isn't going to change the present, and the present is that this is how it works so you'd better be ready for it.)

I am ready for it. I use a Macintosh, and I enjoy the fact that user preferences and other application & OS data are stored in discrete preference files, not a central easily-corruptible registry.