Need an alternative location to write application data in Windows Vista

[brettg]

With Windows Vista, we can no longer write application settings to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE Registry key in the same way. If we don't have Admin permission, our entry will be "virtualized" to our own private key, which makes it the equivalent to HKEY_CURRENT_USER, thus defeating the purpose of writing application to a location available to all users.

I need a place to be able to write application data that will be available to all users. I know about the "Documents and Settings/All Users/Application Data" folder, but found that when I created a .ini file with my application, other non-admin users did not have permission to write to it. So now what do I do?

[brettg]

Great news. After searching around the Web, I found a cool product that seems to solve the problem perfectly. The name is RegDb (www.eztools-software.com/regdb.htm). Its a COM DLL that works sort of like the Windows Registry. In fact, its advertised as an alternative to the Windows Registry specifically to get around this new Windows Vista Registry issue. The COM DLL creates a file at the location you specify and automatically changes the Access Privileges to be writable by ALL USERS. This solves the Admin-created file issue (see original post for details). Then you can call easy-to-use methods like RegDb.OpenKey, RegDb.SetValue and RegDb.GetValue. It supports Text, DWORD, Float and Binary data types, and even supports encryption. It also has a method that retrieves the location of the “Documents and Settings/All Users/Application Data” folder, making it easy for you to build a path to your program’s application data file.