Per-user shell context menu extensions?

[Keith MacDonald]

Vista has broken the ability of applications (eg. WinZip), without elevated
privilege, to add themselves to Explorer's context menus. On previous
versions of Windows, they could do that by writing an entry in the registry
to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers.

Does Vista use an alternative registry location for such entries, that only
apply to the current user, so that no elevation is required?

Thanks!

 

[Keith MacDonald]

That's a pity. If Microsoft are going to put us in a sandbox, they at least
ought to allow us to play. It's a design mistake to assume that all users
of a given PC will want to customize their shell the same way.

 

[Dave Wood [MS]]

As far as I know HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT is a merge of
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes.
So I would have though that the desired keys could be added to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes {which each user has write access to} to
get the desired per-user effect.

Note, I'm not an expert on shell context menus, so forgive me if this is a
blind alley ...

Dave Wood

 

[Keith MacDonald]

Dave, you're more of an expert than you think! That works, so many thanks
for suggesting it.

- Keith