When I map my business object, the field I created as variant has been changed to System.xml.XmlReader. Is this correct?
It really depends on how you plan to store the registry data. How are you retrieving it and how do you plan to restore it? More than likely a VarChar field may be all you need if you pull out the text registry entry. This would be the same code that you see when you export a registry entry to a .REG file.