You have no idea how hard it was to get this to work!. following on from my last posting I moved over from Windows XP to Windows 7 on x64 for development. Although there was some pain in setting up the VB COMs it was nothing to the suffering when it comes to Registry settings.
Some applications were continually giving Generic 500 errors with little or nothing in the Event Logs, so I presumed it was a security problem. Following many hours of messing about, it turns out I was on the wrong track altogether. The specific COMs were failing because they were looking for Registry settings…
All the settings had been imported into their usual position under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SomeApplication, but no matter what I did the values always came back null.
The solution
The answer was hidden away in a MS support article (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896459)
32-bit programs and 64-bit programs that are running on an x64-based version of Windows operate in different modes and use the following sections in the registry:
- Native mode 64-bit programs run in Native mode and access keys and values that are stored in the following registry sub key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software- 32-bit programs run in WOW64 mode and access keys and values that are stored in the following registry sub key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\WOW6432node
So adding a copy of the REG settings to this second location made everything work again.
