Back in the good old days of Windows 95, when your installer needed to replace a file that was "locked" in use by Windows, it would write an entry to the file WININIT.INI with the replacement instructions. So if you installed a program and the program said "Would you like to reboot your computer now?" you could open WININIT.INI and see what it was going to change on the next reboot.

Windows NT and later has an updated mechanism for doing the same thing which doesn't use WININIT.INI. When I write an installer in InstallShield, this aspect of it is handled automatically by the InstallShield engine, but I never knew what it was doing under the hood. Does anyone know how this is being done? Is it writing a registry entry? If so, what's the key?