While the size of the .reg files can impact speed to some degree, realize that every time you Shell, you start up a new environment, possibly wait for CMD.exe to load and initialize, load and run the command, process the data, etc... The point is, there's significant overhead processing Shell commands instead of using built-in commands and functions.
If your reg files are managing printers, native commands would likely be much faster. If they are generic registry data, Kix has a WriteValue command for single value writes, and LoadHive and LoadKey to natively load registry data from a file.
Glenn
_________________________
Actually I
am a Rocket Scientist!
