Windows 7 Pain

Our customer is finally getting around to updating workstations to Windows 7. Part of our team is dedicated to getting our system to work with Windows 7. Guess what? Everything does not work. I could have told you that. Initially I figured we would have problems with registry access, maybe file writing, and some GUI controls. Turns out our biggest pain is the Windows registry.

Turns out we cannot write keys to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. Leave it to Microsoft to break this feature that used to work. There is some new Windows 7 beast called the UAC. If we could turn this feature off, maybe we would be cool. But we do not manage the system settings for our customer.

One of our lead developers put together a hack to use HKEY_CURRENT_USER instead. However that leads to some other headaches. A hack is a hack after all. This might be what we roll out with. There is a short schedule to ship Windows 7 compliant software.

I remember when I first tried to port some of my own tools to Windows 7. Had the same problem. Could not write to the registry. Oh well.