Modify HKCU and/or HKCR registry key(s) for ALL users on a system
Have you ever needed to update a registry key that is stored in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER or HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT hive? Have you also ever needed to update it for ALL users on the system, as well as make it the default setting when a new user profile is created?
That can be a bit of a daunting task. One solution is to add the registry key update to the user’s logon script.
However, there is another way. The idea is to:
- Update the currently logged on user's HKCU (that's easy enough)
- Then you must enumerate every profile on the system
- Find their ntuser.dat file (ntuser.dat contains the contents of the user’s HKCU hive)
- Find their usrclass.dat file (usrclass.dat contains the user's HKCR hive)
- Load ntuser.dat and/or usrclass.dat into a temporary key in the HKLM hive (programmatically or using reg.exe)
- I use
HKLM\TempHiveas the temporary key - Then when you write to
HKLM\TempHiveyou are actually editing that user’s HKCU hive. - If you load ntuser.dat/usrclass.dat for the "Default" user, the settings will take effect for any NEW user profile created on the system
- If more than 1 user is currently logged on, you can edit their HKCU/HKCR hive by looking the user up by their SID under HKEY_USERS and writing to it at that location.
It’s a bit of a tedious job, so I wrote a VBScript that takes care of all of the steps listed above. This script has been tested on Windows XP and Windows 7 (x64), but should work on Windows 2000 and newer. It relies on “reg.exe” which ships with all versions of Windows.
The script can set REG_BINARY keys as long as they are in the format used by a regedit.exe export. For example:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\_Test\MyTestBinarySubkey]
"My Test Binary Value"=hex:23,00,41,00,43,00,42,00,6c,00
To set this binary value using the script, you would modify line 82 to be:
SetBinaryRegKeys sRegistryRootToUse, strRegPathParent03, "My Test Binary Value","hex:23,00,41,00,43,00,42,00,6c,00"
LICENSE: BSD 3-clause