| Give the user a chance to be remembered |
It’s a fact of life, sometimes users just want to uninstall! But often it’s only a temporary measure, maybe they are uninstalling a beta or upgrading to a new version.
Whatever the reason, it makes good sense to give the user the option of having their customizations left behind after uninstall. This is especially true if you’ve gone to the trouble of making your application highly customizable. Users get pretty annoyed if they’ve spent a lot of time customizing your program only to have all their little “tweaks” lost in the uninstall/reinstall process.
There are a number of ways you could provide this functionality; probably the best way is to give your users the option of saving their settings to a file, and providing a mechanism for them to import their settings into the new/reinstalled version. It goes without saying that you should avoid leaving your program settings to clutter up the registry. Whichever way you choose to implement this feature, you can be sure that your users will thank you for it.