"your saying that it might add itself to the registry?"
Perhaps, depending upon how well CC is defended against inappropriate choices.
You chose to download the Portable version. I made the same choice.
There are 3 things that should stop it from using the registry :-
Presence of Portable.dat
Options / Advanced / Save all settings to INI file,
An INI file that has that setting checked.
I cannot uncheck the INI option - it is greyed in. - no manual over-ride.
If this is hard coded into the download, it should never hit the registry.
If absence of the INI and DAT files UN-greys the option it might allow manual over-ride, or even UN-check it.
If you want to keep it from using the registry - just follow the precautions,
Removing INI and DAT is something I cannot predict, and what it does to me could be different for you.
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"However, I don't want to be destroying something beneath the surface."
That will not damage Windows. I think it extremely unlikely that anything bad will happen.
If CC was a M.$ product then disaster follows the slightest deviations from how they think you should use it.
I have more respect for Piriform.
The worst situation I can think of that by doing enough peculiar things you will have settings in both and INI file and also the registry, and your choices may be different.
CC should still use just one set of choices, but it may be the "wrong" set if you cause too much confusion.
In theory it is possible you could confuse CC so much that it uses both sets, which again does no harm if each set was identical, but if the INI set and the Registry set are different, then you might have a conflicting "mix and UN-match" tangle
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Possible reason for different sizes of identical files :-
Portable.dat holds the text
#PORTABLE#
That is 10 characters that each consume ink when printed.
There are no trailing spaces.
There are no blank lines.
There is not even a Carriage Return or Line Feed to show end of line.
Not even a Ctrl-Z to denote end of file - I go back a bit ! !
If I right click and look at properties it will show
Size: 10 bytes (10 bytes)
Size on disk: 4.00 KB (4,096 bytes)
************** OR IT MIGHT SHOW ************
Size: 22 bytes (22 bytes)
Size on disk: 4.00 KB (4,096 bytes)
10 characters can be held in a 10 byte file with ANSI encoding; or
22 bytes with UNICODE encoding; or
22 bytes with UNICODE big endian encoding; or
13 bytes with UTF-8 encoding.
If you right click and "Open with Notepad" (do NOT use Wordpad)
you can then "File / Save as..."
and that will show the encoding of the file you have opened, and allows you to write back with a different encoding.
The "Size on Disk" shows that my system allocates disk space in blocks of 4096 bytes,
most of which is wasted with a 10 byte file.
Many old programs were only able to read/write ANSI.
Most applications in this century can also cope with Unicode.
It is possible that two files can have different encoding and still be reported as identical because the text is the same.
Your two applications may have different encoding - hence different sizes, but WordPad wont know the difference.
I like Q-Dir, much better than Windows Explorer.
Q-Dir shows the file size as 10 byte (or 13 or 22)
W.E. shows it as 1 KB because it always rounds up to the nearest KB.
Regards
Alan