Thanks Ray, at least we know this behaviour is "by design". What I can't quite understand is why those registry hives contain so much data. When we export them they end up being several hundred MB and contain around 2 million lines of registry in exported form. The result of this seems to be that operations that "parse" the registry such as eventvwr or printing seems to take much longer than they do without any AppStacks attached. Printing a basic one word test doc from MS Word takes around 45 seconds to the point it spools. Without appstacks this process takes just 19s.

We always believed that the capture process would be intelligent enough to only capture changes to the registry during the app install and not capture what appears to be essentially an entire copy of the registry minus a couple of arbitrary exceptions.

Out of interest what's your printing/event viewer performance like?