Regarding your statements:

"In the case of backups, this allows you to specify a backup with just a file name (from T-SQL), and the backup will go to this directory." this does work.

"For data/log files, new databases will default to this location unless specified otherwise.", this does not appear to work and the database file location are the same as the master database. You can test this by setting the locations for DefaultData and DefaultLog and then run:

use master

go

select 'master' as DBName , filename from master.sys.sysfiles;

go

create database TestFileLocation

go

select 'TestFileLocation' as DBName, filename from TestFileLocation.sys.sysfiles

go

backup database TestFileLocation to disk = 'TestFileLocation.bak'

go

drop database TestFileLocation

go

Also the registry read statements returns nulls because the statment:

set @ServerName = SUBSTRING(@ServerName,CharIndex('\', @Servername) , 250)

causes the "\" to be included as part of the @servername and needs to change to:

set @ServerName = SUBSTRING(@ServerName,CharIndex('\', @Servername) + 1 , 250)