Registry Locking? (WXP-Home)

[tekgen]

Hey I was wondering if anyone knows a way to completely lock down the registry against any change? I want to stop programs from being able to edit it when they install etc. .../ Please let me know.

[BertImmenschuh]

It's my thought that if the Registry can't be changed/added to, the program/s can't install or run. I consider the Registry to be the brain of the computer and Windows Explorer is the heart, without both there is no Windows.

<font color=blue>Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.</font color=blue>

[dtriplet]

Not quite :)

Look at the WinPE environment, or more importantly, its spinoofs: a commercial variant called the Winternals Administrators Pak and a freeware variant called BartPE. All are based from a CD bootable, limited XP environment, complete with registry that cannot permanantly record changes. Also, neither can use Explorer because of resource limitations, so they use alternative shells, but it all operates in the Windows environment.

Similarly, to reject registry changes, you might look into a variant of user profiles called mandantory profiles. They are read-only, so changes are lost between sessions, and can be applied to many users at once, or individual users one by one. Mark Minasi's "Mastering Windows NT/2000/XP/2003" series explains these very well.


ZC