Turning off Registry Virtualization

On Windows Vista, applications running without admin privileges can write to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, and they’ll be transparently redirected to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\VirtualStore. Similar redirection applies to C:\Program Files.

See Jerry’s Incoherent Babbling for more details.

I spent a couple of hours looking for a way to turn this off or detect it programmatically. There doesn’t appear to be an API call for this.

What I was missing was a single sentence on this MSDN page. If you have an application manifest file that specifies the requestedExecutionLevel attribute, registry virtualization is turned off for that application.

I guess your manifest is saying “Yeah, I know about the new Vista UAC stuff; I don’t need the backward compatibility hack, thanks.”