There's a bug on bugzilla (422) that asks for the registry file format to be re-written in order to be able to dynamically load parts of the registry. If you don't feel like looking it up - don't worry, I'm going to explain why this would benefit wine. . .
It's said that wine loads the entire registry when it first runs, which can get become a waste - even if it's going to be swapped off anyway. . . It's also not the fastest method of input and especially output to the registry. . .
I've looked into using a Balanced Tree DB from BerkelyDB as a quicker interface to the registry. . . I think it would be a good solution, but the question is whether or not you want the overhead of another library added to wine. . . That's why I'm writing here actually - I need to know if it's ok to add this dependancy to wine, or if I should find a different approach.
I know this would cause some chaos in the community - so If this is something that everyone agrees should be done, I'll write a small utility to convert the current ascii registry files into the new format. . .
Let me know what you think . . .
--Brad DeMorrow