I have written a comprehensive business management system for a company. As with all my
previous systems the security part of the system to protect it from illegal use and the
location of the data and help files is stored in the Registry in an entry in Software
under HKey_Current_User.

The company maintaining the hardware decided to improve the network security by converting
it from LAN to Domain based.  This meant that all the users were given new user areas (I
think) and therefore new Registries.  This left all users unable to log into the
management system.

When I suggested that the maintenance engineer might have mentioned such a change to me
prior to implementation I got a message back including the following:

‘I have never encountered a piece of software, especially a multi-user application like a
database, which broke itself in this way before.’

Firstly the system did not ‘break’ it just would not load.  But more importantly is it bad
practice to use the Registry HKey_Current_User for security and data path information.
Should I possibly use HKey_Local_Machine instead?  Would you say this was better practice
or just a choice?

I would be most grateful to hear your various comments on this issue.

Thanks in advance - Peter

Peter


My advice is - don't use the registry!

My personal view is this is one of the worse things M$ ever did. I'd advise simple ini files and (for a db system) a table for any user specific details.

Roy Lambert

I agree with Roy.

You will have even more problems with Vista.

KK Aw