无法写入HKEY_CURRENT_USER

Question

I have a C# program (VS2010) that writes values into a couple of HKEY_CURRENT_USER Registry keys that we create. Normally this works fine, on Win XP, Vista, and 7, x86 and x64 . But on some machines, the keys just do not get written. No exception thrown, the keys and values just aren't there afterwards.

We're pulling out our hair trying to figure out why this would be happening. It's really sporadic ... on one machine it does not work -- but does work on all the other machines in the same office or domain.

What should we be looking for?

Answer 1

What you're describing sounds an awful lot like Microsoft's Registry Virtualization .

But, as I understand, that only applies to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\Software for 32-bit applications.

Registry Virtualization was introduced in Windows Vista as a way of providing backward-compatibility with applications that weren't written with Vista's UAC in mind. The idea is that it redirects your registry operations that would normally affect sensitive areas of the registry (like HKLM) to special locations, where the only impact would be to the current user. It's supposed to also work backward - when accessing one of those parts of the registry, it'll check the redirected location before failing for a non-existent key.