Exactly because of that they fail when interaction with registry and profile folders is required. Self-contained means app stores everything to its folder. But there are setups when this is impossible like when using diskless terminal desktops.

But of course, corporate people always want control of what the user is running, so they should disallow portable apps. Some companies block off the USB ports in an attempt to effect such a policy.

I don’t have much love for registry myself but don’t forget it has advantages as well. I am following one blog of admin that has to work with server+terminals corporate setup and there are lots of his complains on making popular portable stuff (users ask for) run in that environment.

Registry sucks but it’s not like it can be dumped overnight.

Trace/junk cleaners like CCleaner may or may not be enough so if person really wants to get rid of those it’s going to require a lot of tracing for all applications involved and custom cleanup routine.

Additional way to combat traces is moving temporary stuff to the RAM drive so it never reaches HDD.

Thats what they have done.

I guess your question is more about you respecting academic papers and assuming that only something useful is published. YOU ARE WRONG. >95% of academic papers are “bullshit coated bullshit with bullshit fillings”(with apologies to the writers of Scrubs)

Someone needs to develop an OS that doesn’t use a central registry (everything is kept in the applications install folder) so all apps are portable for the getgo AND traces are minimized in the OS. Don’t know if Linux does this but Microsoft would have to do a complete rewrite of the Windows OS to implement this concept.