Framework registry access misbehaves under x64 W2003 Wow6432Node

microsoft.public.dotnet.framework

10 Mar 2006 8:54 PM

Lee Gillie

We are developing under VS 2005, 32-bit. We are trying to bring up a
very large suite of related software on W2003/x64 and found a registry
problem.

Basically our configuration software attempts to write registry values to
HKLM/Software/Our Company/Our System/xxxx

But they are instead being written to
HKLM/Software/Wow6432Node/Our Company/Our System/xxxx

I think I understand the reason for this. But I don't think it is
working as advertised. the problem is we find ONE VALUE actually written to
HKLM/Software/Our Company/Our System/xxxx
and all others written to (along with a duplicate of the above one value)
HKLM/Software/Wow6432Node/Our Company/Our System/xxxx

WHEN the production software that uses this information goes to read the
values, it gets a value for the one value that has been replicated (its
the first thing we read), and ALL OTHER values are coming back NULL, so
I take it must be trying to read these from non-WOW registry, which is
incomplete.

I would have expected this x64 registry design change to be transparent
to 32-bit applications.

All registry reads and writes are done via the framework 2.0 registry
routines, and at present, are only being accessed locally. We will
eventually need to be accessing these remotely as well. I don't have a
clue yet if that part works.