Registry Archives • Helge Klein

Windows 7 Default HKCU Registry Permissions

This is a complete listing of all Windows 7 HKEY_CURRENT_USER registry permissions. The list was generated on a 32-bit installation with SetACL. More default permission listings can be found here.

How the App Paths Registry Key Makes Windows Both Faster and Safer

Why can you start Mozilla Firefox by typing “firefox” in the Run dialog and press enter? Firefox.exe is not located in any directory in the path. The same with Outlook (type “outlook”), PowerShell (“powershell”), VMware Workstation (“vmware”) or Adobe Reader (“acrord32”). This “magic application starting thingy” works because of a little-known Windows feature based on […]

How to Modify Default Share Permissions and Other Tweaks

NTFS permissions are stored in the file system, that is well known. But where are share permissions stored? As so often with Windows: in the registry. Network shares are defined by only a handful of relatively simple registry entries stored in the server service’s key which is, for historical reasons that go back way beyond […]

Registry Tricks

Here are some pretty cool ways to work with the Windows registry. Regedit Multiple Instances Start multiple instances of Regedit by appending the command-line parameter -m, e.g.: regedit -m.

New Articles, Tools, Tips and Tricks: Office 2010, RDS/XenApp, Windows, Web

As before this is mainly a condensed and beautified version of my twitter postings. You can get them unfiltered and without delay by following me.

Which Software Installed That Driver – And When?

Installing a software that includes a driver may leave your system in an inconsistent state. If the install fails, parts may remain on the system. And if the remaining part is a driver, I get nervous – drivers are not the kind of stuff I want to have lingering around my system’s memory. Here is […]

New Articles, Tools, Tips and Tricks: Bugs, Annoyances, PowerShell and some other Stuff

Bugs and Annoyances ICA connections initiated over the ICA client object (ICO) SDK fail because 128-bit encryption cannot be enabled. Apparently, setting EncryptionLevelSession does not work. Annoyingly, this bug is more than a year old, was fixed in the ICA client 10.2 and reappeared in the current version 11.0. Bugs like this one are bad […]

Programming Sins Regarding the Registry (Using the Example of Microsoft Excel)

While browsing through the registry I found the following “gem”. It illustrates nicely how programmers are not supposed to store settings in the registry: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MenuExt\Nach Microsoft E&xcel exportieren] @="res://C:\\PROGRA~2\\MICROS~1\\Office12\\EXCEL.EXE/3000" "Contexts"=dword:00000001

Registry Fun (Working With Hive Files)

Sometimes it is necessary to export/import data from or into the registry for some sort of additional processing. To this end, often regedit is used to create .REG files, which store a human-readable text interpretation of the registry content. .REG files can be edited easily with any capable text editor (even Notepad), and thus are […]

Free Tool – List Registry Links (REG_LINK)

Recently I got into a very interesting discussion with my colleague Nicholas Dille on various aspects of Windows x64. One question he brought up was especially intriguing: knowing about registry redirection, it is not astonishing to find that the 32-bit version of the registry key HKLM\Software\Classes (aka HKCR) gets to be HKLM\Software\Classes\Wow6432Node. But there is […]

Windows x64 Part 7: File System & Registry Redirection, Registry Reflection

This is the seventh part of a mini-series on Windows x64, focusing on behind the scene changes in the operating system. In the last article I explained that mixed 32-/64-bit processes are not allowed and how that rule affects both administrators and script-writers. In this context I mentioned the strangely named directory SysWOW64. Today I […]

Another IT Legend

Some time ago I wrote about a misconception so common that it might pass as an IT legend – the confusion of HKU\.Default with the default user’s registry hive. Recently I came across another interesting misapprehension. As you know, the profiles base directory (usually C:\Documents and Settings) contains not only one special sub-folder, Default User, […]

Why is (Almost) Everybody Wrong About HKU\.Default?

Most technical folks have stumbled across the registry hive HKEY_USERS\.Default at some point. Many of them think they know what it is used for. Interestingly, most who do are wrong. The misconception about what HKU\.Default is used for dates back to the good old days when Windows NT 4.0 was still considered “new technology”. This […]

Tag: Registry

Windows 7 Default HKCU Registry Permissions

How the App Paths Registry Key Makes Windows Both Faster and Safer

How to Modify Default Share Permissions and Other Tweaks

Registry Tricks

New Articles, Tools, Tips and Tricks: Office 2010, RDS/XenApp, Windows, Web

Which Software Installed That Driver – And When?

New Articles, Tools, Tips and Tricks: Bugs, Annoyances, PowerShell and some other Stuff

Programming Sins Regarding the Registry (Using the Example of Microsoft Excel)

Registry Fun (Working With Hive Files)

Free Tool – List Registry Links (REG_LINK)

Windows x64 Part 7: File System & Registry Redirection, Registry Reflection

Another IT Legend

Why is (Almost) Everybody Wrong About HKU\.Default?