If you want a yes or no from me, I would like to see all non-stealth applications banned as well, not because they are not portable but there are thousands of them in the Internet. If you really want them all on your web site you have to add a lot more to your database I guess. And in my opinion you have already too much repertory. Why not keeping it simple and take care of only the portable AND stealth applications? It saves time for you as well.But if you look at the comments, the purists say I shouldn't list such apps in the dataabse! To them, registry writes = not portable, which I disagree with.
If you don't want here is another suggestion. In the feed list mark all non-stealth apps with an ! before the name.
That's why I would not differ between writing for reasons of settings or something else. Either an app leaves generally avoidable footprints at the host or not.For example, some apps use 3rd party controls that for some reason writes some values to the registry. But these values are not associated with any of the app settings, and can't even be changed via the app interface.
Maybe you should open another thread for this. But again, why not limit it only to the best of the bunch, so no edge cases are allowed at all? It sounds very hard but I believe there are heaps of applications left that fit. And these ones are highly portable, nearly stealth, genuine freeware and hence highly usable for everybody on every Windows system.freeware