Can I give permission to a user on HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT ?

[Guest]

I need to give permission to a user to the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT hive so that he can run a legacy program (that needs to update this part of the Registry upon starting). Can I do this ? Are they some specific risks and problems ?

The reason to ask this question stems from the following good and bad experiences:

PaintShop 6 (the lagacy program) needs to write to some keys in the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT hive when starting. This causes a problem when a user (with no administrator privilege) wishes to start the program (he gets an error message : "Failed to update the Registry. Try REGEDIT").

In a first attempt on one machine, I made the user member of a group which I called "JASC" and gave to this JASC group full permissions on the hive HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT. This has worked fine.

I a second attempt, on another machine, I gave full permissions on the same hive to ne specific user ... BUT then Windows failed to boot anymore (even under Safe Mode !). Fortunately, that machine had been equipped with the free version of RestoreIT! (from FarStone; the full version of the program is called SecurePC). So I could restore it to the original state under DOS and I only lost one day work...

My question is: what did I do wrong ? Is it allowed to gave full permission to a group to the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT hive but not a specific user ?

Thanks for help.

 

[David Candy]

Ask Jasc. But you can have per user settings. HKCR doesn't exist. It is a merge of HKLM\Software\classes and HKCU\Software\classes with user overriding machine. If a key is in user then they'll be able to write to it at hkcr.