如何找到InternetRegistry用户密钥或父注册表密钥

Question

I have a BHO which on the first run is gathering activation information and storing this in the registry.

(I think) due to IE's permission's I am only able to store this in the registry branch

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\Internet Explorer\\InternetRegistry\\REGISTRY\\USER\\S-0-0-00-000000000-000000000-000000000-0000\\Software\\MyBHO\\MyKey

Where S-0-0-00-000000000-000000000-000000000-0000 is a unique key for each user.

Which is fine using RegCreateKey() with "Software\\MyBHO\\MyKey" . It's all created and running lovely. It determines where in space to store the Key with no problems.

The Problem:

When I carry out an uninstall I want to remove this key and as this is run outside of IE I have no way to determine where that key is / what the user string is.

Options I have in mind:

Option 1 (Ideal) Find out this user string first to then build a new path for the key I wish to remove and remove it. How?

Option 2 At the point of activation store the path to the key in another registry value that can be accessed. Then read, and delete both (Which seems a bit backwards and probably wont work due to the access restrictions of the BHO on the registry (Thus it being written there in the first place))

Do you know if there is any way to find this User key or even how to find the parent dir.

Edit Upon continued research I've found that the thing I'm referring to as "user key" is the current Users "SID". Maybe this will yield me better results.

Answer 1

Call GetUserName to get the user name, and LookupAccountName to get his SID.

ConvertSidToStringSid is a useful utility function to format a SID as a S-1-5-32-00000000-00000000-00000000-00000000-0000 string

Answer 2

If you really want to write per-user data to the registry, use IEGetWriteableHKCU() .

In general there is no good way to remove per-user data at uninstall. For example, what if you install as user A and the uninstall as user B? Are you going to go find all of them and delete them? Just leave the turds behind.

Alternatively you could consider using a different data store. Do you really need the registry? Can you store this data in a file? What about Web Storage ?