VirtualStore in Windows Vista

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I was researching on one of the issues for my customer and got to read about this registry key.

HKCU\Software\Classes\VirtualStore

This key will be given to applications on vista who tries to do registry operations which requires admin privileges which it does not have. So, the key,

HKCU\Software\Classes\VirtualStore\MACHINE

will be HKLM for such interactive applications. This virtualization is done in order to stop lots of legacy application from breaking on vista. Make note of the fact that all new applications developed for vista should take care of rights given to normal applications and program accordingly (I mean, new applications should not use this virtualstore thing).

Another thing to keep in mind is, this virtualstore is given in HKCU so, if two users runs the same application, they will be getting different virtualstore and will not be sharing the values written by application, so, thats a strong reason not to use this thing for newly developed application.

Stay tuned.. Wave