Registry in Windows7 - appears in powershell, but not regedit

Question

My software is writing to the registry (HKCU:\software\classes\clsid\). The key that I'm writing isn't appearing when I go to that location in regedit. However, if I navigate to that location in powershell, then I see ONLY the entry I added, and not the other class ids that I see in regedit. It's almost as if there's two versions of the registry.

I'm using Windows7 (moved recently from XP, so there's probably some weird virtualization stuff going on which I've not learnt yet! ;-)).

Thanks for any help with this, Dan.

Answer 1

Yes, the registry settings for applications in certain situations work differently in Windows 7 than they did in XP. You can read about it here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb530198.aspx

Basically, 32 bit software apps all get their own "virtual" registry space for the purposes of backwards compatibility so that apps no longer need to be run "As Administrator" to conform to the new security policy in Vista (and for the most part carried on by Win7).