Registry keys deleted in Windows 10 regedit.exe appear again if regedit.exe is started by another application

Question

I've been tweaking loading times of directory contents in Windows Explorer of Windows 10 and I have deleted some of the keys in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\PropertySystem\PropertyHandlers.

So far so good. But I have as well an application which can start regedit.exe on demand.

And when regedit.exe is started by this application, all deleted keys are in their former places. If I start regedit.exe manually, those keys are not present.

Question, does this application open regedit.exe with some different account and registry hive I'm seeing is not hive of my user profile?

If not, then what causes this ghostly effect?

Answer 1

The situation where it seems there are two different versions of the registry can occur on 64bit Windows machines. There is the normal SOFTWARE node:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE

and there is a second one for 32bit applications

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node

All reads and changes done by any 32bit application are done against the WOW6432Node. Using regedit.exe manually, you will usually look directly under SOFTWARE. But you can open the WOW6432Node node as well.