0
2
We have a software which saves its connection info to the Windows registry, under HKLM\Software
. It's only a 32bit application, not 64bit, and we're well aware of the different locations for that (WOW6432Node
). We are 150% sure we are reading and writing the very same registry entries - our software is some 20+ years old.
In the past month, 3 computers, two of them Windows 7, and the third Windows 10, have been acting very strange. The only way we can describe it, is that it's as if the Windows Registry has been duplicated! We write connection info in the registry for our app to connect to the server. But it reads old entries which we've changed a long time ago!
It seems, if we run the app "As Administrator", then they want to play nice. Although the user logged in is a local admin of the PC. For example, we open Regedit
and change one of these entries. Run our app, and it reads the old entries from before it was changed, but then we run the app as administrator, and suddenly it gets the correct entries.
Is this a known issue? What's going on here? Is it some Windows update that broke this? Anything I can do to fix it?
You may know this already, but many don't. After making any change in regedit, if you plan to use that setting, hit F5 refresh. I don't know exactly why, but I've come across a lot of cases where the F5 alone, allowed those changes to become effective immediately. YMMV, depending on the application. – DaaBoss – 2018-04-20T15:31:00.110
Under which registry key is your data? – harrymc – 2018-04-20T17:38:11.220
@harrymc As said in my question,
HKLM\Software
, specifically theWOW6432Node
(since it's 32bit). – Jerry Dodge – 2018-04-20T22:25:47.600@DaaBoss Well using Regedit is just a simple example, anyway. The same applies when these entries are modified from another application (a tool of ours dedicated for the sole purpose of changing these registry entries only). So it's as if some applications use one part of the registry, while others use another place. But they are coded to read/write the exact same place. The underlying implementation of the registry (in Delphi) automatically accommodates for 32bit/64bit differences. – Jerry Dodge – 2018-04-20T22:28:45.513
(1) Could you be more specific about the key? (2) Have you tried to use regedit to search for the old data to find where it's hiding and compare it to where you placed the new one? – harrymc – 2018-04-21T07:18:57.670
@harrymc (1) The only way I can be more specific is to give you our company/software name, which I'm not going to do.
HKLM\Software\CompanyName\SoftwareName\
(2) Values not found anywhere else in regedit. – Jerry Dodge – 2018-04-21T18:46:35.123@JerryDodge Did the program change between using a config file and the registry at some time, and some users are using the wrong version of the program? – Andrew Morton – 2018-04-21T20:00:03.207