Except for "the hive". Remember the hive? Sort of an alternate registry, in addition to the actual registry. Granted, it was pretty invisible, until it got corrupted.
I had a win2k machine that was my daily (at home) that was fine until idk about 2006, at which point something happened (muons?) and it would go into some kind of panic state just after bringing up the desktop. Hive corruption. I tried on and off for a couple of years to repair it, no luck. It wasn't just about the files on the HD, it was easy enough to transplant the drive and read/write anything, it was that I really liked the way I had the environment configured. Sure, it was all kind of moot, but it became a kind of personal windmill to resurrect this old thing. In the end, I booted an XP CD in it, and selected 'upgrade', and voila, it was Duncan Idaho, back from the dead.
Anyway.. loved win2k, but not a fan of the hive.
I think you are mistaking the registry for the registry.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030808-00/?p=42...
The registry is a collection of individual database files known as hives.