Currently OpenMPT uses ReadPrivateProfile* / WritePrivateProfile*functions provided by Windows for reading and writing its settings files. This has several issues

• It's relatively slow, which is why we only write setting that we know have changed
• It requires hacks to enforce writing unicode files

As a consequence of the first point, it's possible that one OpenMPT instance takes a long time to shut down, and a newly launched instance may not see the settings as saved by the previous instance. One particularly worrying example is the following scenario:

1. Fresh OpenMPT installation, user sees the Welcome dialog and unchecks automatic update checks
2. User closes OpenMPT. This is the first time the INI file is written, so it takes quite a while to write out all settings.
3. User immediately reopens OpenMPT. It may now try to search for updates because the old instance might not have finished writing the settings yet.

A custom INI implementation should avoid this scenario. While the file is being written, other OpenMPT instances should wait until the file is no longer locked, rather than reading incomplete settings.