Advapi32Util can't read from registry as non-admin

[myleshorton]

No problem reading as a user with admin privileges, but as non-admin I get:

com.sun.jna.platform.win32.Win32Exception: The system cannot find the file specified.
at com.sun.jna.platform.win32.Advapi32Util.registryGetStringValue(Advapi32Util.java:508)

Note this is reading from HKEY_CURRENT_USER, and I'm able to read through calling out to REG through Windows command prompt (from same Java process as gave the above error..).

[myleshorton]

The above is from 3.4.1 (I think), just grabbed it from your dist directory a couple of days ago..

[dblock]

This could be a WOW64 redirect problem, maybe?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa384182(v=vs.85).aspx

[TomGood75]

I know this is old, but I ran into the same problem and didn't find a clear answer. It is exactly as dblock mentioned, a WOW64 redirect problem. I was getting the same error as above, and upon doing a listing of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software, realized windows was silently redirecting to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Wow64Node\Software node based on the results returned. This was also causing my reads and writes to keys under the Software parent node to fail, because they didn't exist under the Wow64Node node.

After reading up on windows registry redirector {
redirector itself: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/aa384232%28VS.85%29.aspx
alternate views / workaround for it: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/aa384129%28VS.85%29.aspx
}
As a quick fix, I ended up just creating a local methods of registryKeyExists, registryGetStringValue, registrySetStringValue that were copies of the base methods, but with forcing the view to fix the redirect issue.

For example, in registryKeyExists, instead of:
int rc = Advapi32.INSTANCE.RegOpenKeyEx(root, key, 0, WinNT.KEY_READ, phkKey);
change to:
int rc = Advapi32.INSTANCE.RegOpenKeyEx(root, key, 0, WinNT.KEY_READ | 0x0100, phkKey);

You basically need to change the "REGSAM samDesired" parameter on the RegOpenKeyEx calls to have the view mask needed - I also ended up using the static variable WinNT.KEY_WOW64_64KEY instead of 0x0100 in the code to keep it cleaner instead of the above, but thought I'd leave the bitmask above in since it relates to the MSDN note a little clearer.

Good luck!

-- By the way, this issue was with a fresh pull today of jna and platform versions 3.5.2

[dblock]

This just says that we need to expose an additional parameter to the utility method so that the value of WinNT.KEY_READ isn't hard-coded. Maybe you can make a pull request?

[matthiasblaesing]

Closing this as fix was merged a long time ago.