HKEY_CURRENT_USER

[Michael Bulgrien]

Please, it would be nice, when working with the local registry, to be able to navigate the HKEY_CURRENT_USER registry hive. I realize that HKEY_CURRENT_USER equates to one of the User SIDs in the list, but most users will have no idea which SID is associated with their current windows login.

[Erik]

Please, it would be nice, when working with the local registry, to be able to navigate the HKEY_CURRENT_USER registry hive.

Pick File > Open Registry.
Click on the browse button in the "Base" group.
Select "HKEY_CURRENT_USER".
Click OK.
Click OK.


Regards,

[Erik]

I realize that HKEY_CURRENT_USER equates to one of the User SIDs in the list, but most users will have no idea which SID is associated with their current windows login.
The active SID should have the longest name as well as a paired "_Classes" key.

Regards,

[Craig]

To clarify why the answer isn't "yes, it should", we don't want to have duplicate nodes within the tree.

[Michael Bulgrien]

Pick File > Open Registry.
Click on the browse button in the "Base" group.
Select "HKEY_CURRENT_USER".
Click OK.
Click OK.


This doesn't work. That was why I posted in the first place...I wanted to browse to "HKEY_CURRENT_USER" but it was not in the list to select.

I have since tried selecting the Key option button instead of All and the "HKEY_CURRENT_USER" key name was pre-loaded, so that works. It wasn't intuitive, though. Since I didn't want to have to type in a key I was intentionally leaving the selection on All and browsing...but that didn't work for this node.

The active SID should have the longest name as well as a paired "_Classes" key.

If you are an administrator, there will be multiple "long" SIDs (one for each user on the system) each paired with a "_Classes" key... so that doesn't help.

To clarify why the answer isn't "yes, it should", we don't want to have duplicate nodes within the tree.

I don't mind if the "duplicate" node doesn't exist in the tree in the compare panes... I just wanted to be able to browse to it from File -> Open.

As far as the left and right compare panes go, it would be nice to have an HKCU toggle button that adds the "HKEY_CURRENT_USER" node and removes the current user's SID from the "HKEY_USERS" node, and vise versa. There are many times that I have .Reg files that include nodes in "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" as well as in "HKEY_CURRENT_USER" which results in a mis-aligned compare such as this one (http://screencast.com/t/PC9qbtzLk):

http://content.screencast.com/users/Bulgrien/folders/Jing/media/04808501-e4db-4a84-97a9-4afc084cf0d4/2010-12-17_0125.png

[Aaron]

Hello Michael,

If you use the Browse button to open the Open Registry (Left Side), then pick local on the top, and All on the bottom, use the bottom browse button to browse for the base.

You should see the HKEY_CURRENT_USER as an option here. Is this not showing up for you? That would be unexpected.

If it is showing up here, but not in another instance/registry you are comparing to, could you give a bit more detail on what you are loading on that side?

[Michael Bulgrien]

I already stated that it is not showing up.
And, even if it did, it would not solve the problem shown in my screenshot.

[Aaron]

Hello Michael,

When browsing the local registry, it should show up. I'd be interested in figuring out what state you are currently in, since this would be similar to not seeing the "My Documents" folder in a Folder Compare browse dialog. It is possibly a bug or some other unexpected case.

Erik is currently out of the office, but I'll pass this thread along to him when he gets back from vacation for his input.

The Registry Compare is still new, and we appreciate collecting various test scenarios on how you are currently using it and how you have set it up.

As a workaround for now, you can set the Current_User and User as base directories, and compare from that level, correct?

[Michael Bulgrien]

Hi Aaron... Thanks for your patience with me while I figure this out. After more testing, I see that I did not have "Local" selected on the top. I guess, as long as I had my local machine name listed in the "remote" text box, I expected the results to be the same. Now that I realize why it wasn't working...it does make sense...but since there are two completely separate group boxes, it was not intuitively obvious to me that the bottom set of options were dependent on the top.

So, the only issue that remains is the inability to compare the registry against a .reg file which contains registry keys under both HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and HKEY_CURRENT_USER. Sure, I can compare both nodes independently of each other...but what I would really like to do is to compare the entire .reg file against the system registry in a single compare session.

[Craig]

We can make that mistake less likely if we detected the local system's name and switched to local registry access if it matches.