WinXP Registry Rights

[wgcs]

One of our customers just reported a problem with one of our products saving settings in the registry.

They're using WinXP, running as administrator, yet, after installing the program, the program can't change certain registry entries in it's own registry branch:
\\LocalMachine\Software\Our company name\our product name\valueX

About 3 values were successfully created at that location, and then no more. Our installer (using ISE, full) doesn't create any keys (but I'm guessing the answer is that it must, and must somehow set permissions for our program to access them).

Since we couldn't reproduce the problem in shop, our customer had someone diagnose the exact problem, and it was that that registry branch didn't have permissions set to allow our program access.

This confuses me, because only our program could have possibly created that branch to start with! Was it allowed to add values as long as it had the initial handle, but as soon as that handle was released, it lost the right?

(this program is a VFP6 program, but I'm getting the feeling this question might better be asked in a different forum... WinAPI? doesn't quite seem right either...)

 

[rgbean]

wgcs,
Just a guess, but are they using any "Profiles" to limit access to any system functionality? Note: Installers, because they are going through a speciallized "installer" API, can get away with some things that mere applications can't.

Rick

 

[wgcs]

That was my first guess, but the customer "said" when we directed him to the user manager in Control Panel ( If that's where it is... he found it, but I need to get an XP machine to play with... I have very little experience with it, but when I use it, I don't like it, so I don't want to conver my development machine...)

He said that there only existed one user and that user was in the Administrators group.

Is there a way to determine what profiles might be limiting his access?

Apparently his machine is a white-box built at a local computer store, because that's where he went back to and they were able to change the "Program Access" to the registry for our branch for our program.

Ah... I just opened RegEdt32 (I usually use RegEdit) and I see how a user can change permissions. How do those get set originally?