How does ESSO use the Windows Registry?
ESSO manipulates the same Registry cell as regular Broker. The only difference is that ESSO stores a little more information there. Broker uses the Registry cell HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE:\Software\Vista\Broker\Servers to store the list of Vista servers and their port numbers. A single entry in the cell looks like: alice,9300: REG_SZ: 1 which translates to an entry named “alice,9300” with a value of 1. Broker uses “alice,9300” to mean that the Vista server alice will accept Broker connections on port 9300. ESSO modifies the format of these entries to look like alice,9300,ratbert: REG_SZ: 1 adds a third field to the name. This third field, ratbert in this example, indicates that the NT/W2K machine named ratbert offers an Authentication Proxy server that will offer ESSO style connection startup to Vista server alice.
