Was just curious to know if there is a typical method for handling application settings. I have two types of settings; Applications settings (like user preferences) and 'system' settings (server IP, options related to the industrial machine it's running on that need to be set at startup, ports that certain devices are attached to, etc).

I was thinking that what I'm referring to as system settings would be in a configuration.ini type of file that can easily be edited. Then save the other settings either in the registry or a separate user.cfg file that would not be edited on it's own but changed through option settings in the program itself.

Am I over complicating this? Is it normal to use the registry to store program settings or would it be better in a file?