Re: Java Preferences and Windows 7 Restricted Users

I confirmed that this is a "system Preferences" vs "user Preferences"
issue. An unprivileged user can't modify "system Preferences." If the
app can't get along with user prefs and/or treating system prefs as
read-only you may have a real problem. Also, you can't cleanly handle
the error condition that happens when an unprivileged user tries to
modify a system preference on Linux. On Windows the registry msg comes
out, period, but you can catch the exception and add a little grace to
the situation. But on Linux the runtime spews a msg and then terminates
the process: control never gets back to the exception handler. That's
regrettable.

This API was released in Java 1.4 ("Merlin") in late 2001 or early 2002.
I helped train Sun system engineers about Preferences and other features
like NIO and Assertions and have to say that I didn't see a lot of
traffic about Preferences and Assertions subsequently. Poking around
earlier I noticed that Apple seems to have embraced Preferences for
various handy features with their Java implementation on Mac OS X.

-Pete