As we will discover throughout this book, OLE makes extensive use of the system registry, and many of the samples require specific registry entries in order to operate correctly. To that end, most samples have a REG file in their respective directories that you must merge with the registry before running the sample. You do this by double-clicking on the WIN32.REG file (or WIN16.REG file) from the system shell. If you forget to do this, some samples might work only partially, and some might not work at all. This can be very confusing, so train yourself to question whether the registry is correct when something goes awry.
You might wonder why there isn't just one global registry file for everything in this book. This is because a number of the samples change between chapters and therefore require different registry entries for those changes.
OLE registry information often involves a pathname to a DLL or an EXE server for some object class, as well as pathnames of type libraries. The REG files on the CD assume that these paths are based on C:\INOLE, the default installation directory. If you install to a different directory, you'll need to edit every REG file (just text files) and change "c:\inole" to your installation directory.