I am just wondering what is happening in the wallet.dat file in the standard bitcoin client.

Can anybody explain the high level functionality in a way a layman can understand?

First I thought the file was just a list of private keys. But it does not seem to be the case.

I see in the log:
Flushed wallet.dat 408ms
AddToWallet xxxxxxxx  new

Why does it need to write anything to the file when
it is starting up (rescanning). I thought it was only needed to write to wallet.dat when generating a new address.



Don.