Mike
Thanks for fixing the registration issue on Japanese systems. The program now opens normally.
Nissin

As I suspected, only the three double-byte languages - Chinese (traditional & simplified), Japanese and Korean - seem to cause problems with registration if they are designated as the non-unicode languages in Win 7. So, as things stand on my system, the only way I can avoid re-registering each time the program is opened is to use English. This is not an option for me, however, as I need to read Japanese mail. It's not a big deal: it's just a bit annoying, especially as the folder structure gets reset sometimes when I open an image directly from Lightroom to Ultimate.
Nissin

Yes, I'm afraid so. My experience suggests that whichever version of Win 7 you use, the registration problem will remain as long as your non-unicode language is Chinese - or Japanese, as in my case. Later I'm going to experiment by setting other languages as the non-unicode option to see if they also cause a problem. I'll let you know how it goes.
Nissin

I can confirm aaronchan's 'fix' works for me too on Win 7 Ultimate (Japanese). As I mentioned in my original message, the OS is setup to function totally in English except that I have to retain Japanese as the non-unicode language because without this setting MS Outlook cannot display Japanese characters in message headers. As Mike suggests, it would seem that there is a conflict between the way registration information is encoded by QI Ultimate and the way that Chinese & Japanese Win XP & Win 7 write or read the values.

Nissin

I have had this same problem since I installed QI Ultimate on Windows 7 Ultimate and Windows 7 Home Premium systems. The former I run in English mode, but it has a Japanese core system: the Premium is Japanese only. On both configurations, each time I complete the registration details I receive the confirmation message and the details are written to registry, where they remain.

When I first contacted Mike about the problem he wondered if there was a registry read problem, but I don't run any programs on either configuration that might interfere with reading registry and my virus & malware definitions are always up-to-date. I have no problem registering and using QI Studio on my Win 7 Ultimate  set-up or on an old Japanese XP system. I wondered at the time whether the problem might be related to using a Japanese system, but Mike thought not. But if, as I suspect, aaronchan is using a double-byte (Chinese) version of XP, then maybe there's something in common with his problem and mine.

Addendum:
I've just installed QI Ultimate on the XP system mentioned above and I have the exact same problem.