Windows Installer

The programming concept utilised by Windows is called the “Microsoft Component Object Model” or more commonly, just COM.  The term COM is an umbrella term that encompasses the OLE, OLE Automation, ActiveX, COM+ and DCOM technologies.  Regardless of the terms, all you need to know is that Windows programs have lots of registry keys that link to a physical file& the specifics of how this is done is normally based on COM.