re: HKLM/CLASSES_ROOT/CURRENT_USER/SOFTWARE/PURE-DATA/PD/USERDATA/PREFS/AUDIODEV
...and to tweak a setting, you open up regedit, do a search that takes 30 seconds to complete..and of course if you decide to reinstall windows or change machines, wave goodbye to your settings unless you manually exported it to a file..i think windows is great, but the registry is certainly not in the list of reasons...
so it seems everyone is particular to a certain flavour of storing user configuration data, but nobody has an opinion on storing data after the program is actually launched -- "pool" is great, but you dont get sick of cabling/sending/recieving stuff into it all the time ? the little clicky-box thing i remember from playing aroudn w/ max was quite cool, well that & the 'randomize parameters' feature in samplitude.. no idea on how difficult this would be to do, but it seems an app named 'pure data' should be able to take a snapshot of all the current numbers/control data (what, 10K of ram?) for later retrival, exporting to file, building up a sequence of snapshots to morph between in live situations, or storing for later analysis, etc...