Software Installation Advice

[mcattini]

Hi

I'm having a problem with a piece of software I developed, specifically, the part of it the manages the licensing, which is the only bit that creates registry entries. The software is an Access 2002 database deployed with Access runtime

In a nutshell I have a school who when they install the software on a computer running Windows XP Pro and logged in as Administrators it installs fine and starts up as expected. When I then log onto the computer as an XP User the licensing check fails (i.e. there is a problem with the software's registry entry). When I go back and login as an administrator it is fine.

The school uses a Windows Server 2003 with 'Vanilla' configuration and has 3 groups set-up Admin, Users, and Staff and has Windows XP Pro on their computers.

I strongly suspect that there is an issue with security policies affecting the registry. I'm assuming from looking some of the posts on here many of you have experienced similar installation problems.

Could anyone point me in the direction of:

1: what might cause such problems and steps I could take to check possible causes
2: what steps I can take to check any suggested causes
3: workable solutions to them

Thanks

Marc

[sted]

can ANY administrator run it or just the one who installed it?

[mcattini]

I'll need to check if any Administrator can run it or only the one who installed it with the school and get back here with the result.

What's your line of thinking here sted and you'll have to be gentle as area of expertise does not encompass the Windows registry, Newtork Configuation, XP User Profiles etc. I'm more at home desiging databases and writing code.

[p858snake]

my first guess without knowing more, is that its putting the license in the users registry compared to the system one.

[mcattini]

Looking on my laptop where it is installed the registry keys are created in company_name\application_name sub folders of both HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE.

At the risk of sounding dim, where do I look for the system registry?

It works fine on my laptop I can log on as any Administrator or User. However, I am not hooked up to a Windows 2003 server.

[p858snake]

Looking on my laptop where it is installed the registry keys are created in company_name\application_name sub folders of both HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE.

At the risk of sounding dim, where do I look for the system registry?

It works fine on my laptop I can log on as any Administrator or User. However, I am not hooked up to a Windows 2003 server.

by system registry i was referring to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, i just couldn't remember the name off the top of my head.

[theriver]

You'll hit problems if you're trying to write to HKLM while a User, or if you're reading from HKCU* as someone who didn't install the software (i.e. the registry entries the installing Administrator wrote are in *their* proflie, not the current one).

You may know of Process Explorer - this will tell you exactly what's being accessed.

Process Monitor


It seems odd that you're not seeing the problem on your PC, but unless you're testing with a clean Windows install, it's not really a fair test.

[dhicks]

the registry keys are created in company_name\application_name sub folders of both HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE.

And where does your program try to read the values from? If it tries HKEY_CURRENT_USER... first, and reports an error when it can't find the registry key, then there's your problem.

--
David Hicks

[ricki]

Hi

Does the software run when the computer is truned on and or when the user logs on and copies a file to the server so that it can be imported into the database. If it does you might have to check the share / file ntfs permissions.

Richard

[ricki]

Sorry I forgot.

Does the program run as a service or a script. If it runs as a script does the employee or student have to rights to run it. It might be worth checking the event log. If you log into the machine and run it under a restricted account and remotely log into the event viewer you can see what happens. Plus dont forget to do a fresh in the event viewer every time as it will pull the info from the client pc.

Richard

[mcattini]

Thanks for the ideas dhicks, theriver and ricki.

I shall take steps to get each of these checked and report back. It may be a week or so as i need to work with the school concerned and the supplier of the licensing module used by my software.

Marc