HKCU Registry Hive & ASP.NET impersonated application

[Robert Drozdz]

Hello everybody!

There are many posts here concerning registry access and some derived problems.
I couldn't find however any simple answer to this basic question:

How can an impersonifited ASP.NET application access the HKCU registry hive of the user on whose behalf it runs?

It is obvious that that hive is not automatically loaded, thus what method does Microsoft recommend to load it so that my APS application can refer to HKCU?

I am using a third-party DLL (.NET) which keeps some data in the registry on per-user basis and I cannot change this design. That DLL works perfectly for its authors because they build desktop applications.

Any help, hints and ideas appreciated
Robert Drozdz

[Nicole Calinoiu]

Robert,

HKCU will not be populated for your target user because the execution
context is a service. This will continue to be a problem regardless of
whether you authenticate the user via IIS or ASP.NET.

Instead of trying to get the data out of HKCU, have you considered trying
to read for HKU? See http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/ntsecuritynet.asp
for help on mapping the WindowsIdentity token to an SID string for use in
identifying the correct subky of HKU.

HTH,
Nicole
"Robert Drozdz" <Robert Dr****@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:BC**********************************@microsof t.com...

Hello everybody!

There are many posts here concerning registry access and some derived
problems.
I couldn't find however any simple answer to this basic question:

How can an impersonifited ASP.NET application access the HKCU registry
hive of the user on whose behalf it runs?

It is obvious that that hive is not automatically loaded, thus what method
does Microsoft recommend to load it so that my APS application can refer
to HKCU?

I am using a third-party DLL (.NET) which keeps some data in the registry
on per-user basis and I cannot change this design. That DLL works
perfectly for its authors because they build desktop applications.

Any help, hints and ideas appreciated
Robert Drozdz