Prepare!

In response to a recent opera.tech post:

When writing applications for any operating system, developers must eventually rely on some APIs and underlying libraries supplied by the OS vendor. Opera.exe is no exception. In fact, if you investigate the number of Microsoft-written .DLLs that load into the Opera.exe process space, you may be surprised.

Here's a list of MS DLLs loaded into the Opera.exe process space on my Windows XP SP2 system:

• advapi32.dll
  
• comctl32.dll
  
• comdlg32.dll
  
• dnsapi.dll
  
• gdi32.dll
  
• hnetcfg.dll
  
• imm32.dll
  
• kernel32.dll
  
• msimg32.dll
  
• msvcrt.dll
  
• mswsock.dll
  
• ntdll.dll
  
• ole32.dll
  
• rasadhlp.dll
  
• rpcrt4.dll
  
• rsaenh.dll
  
• setupapi.dll
  
• shell32.dll
  
• shlwapi.dll
  
• user32.dll
  
• usp10.dll
  
• uxtheme.dll
  
• version.dll
  
• winmm.dll
  
• ws2_32.dll
  
• ws2help.dll
  
• wshtcpip.dll
  
• wsock32.dll
  

As such, I suspect most of the registry activity seen at Opera startup is from these MS .DLLs, and not explicitly by Opera.exe itself. In other words, Opera has very little control over how MS develops its operating system DLLs, and whether or not they use the registry to store information -- such as language/region settings, WinSock parameters, etc.

Keep in mind, too, that Opera also loads third-party plugins at startup, and these plugins can also read Windows registry settings at startup.

Hope this info helps.