Just received a note from a reader:
Hi Steve,
Is the auto logon program you have for download supposed to work with Windows Vista Ultimate x64? (doesn’t seem to work)
It works just fine on x86 Vista, but doesn’t autologon with x64 machines.
Thanks
This particular utility writes to some registry keys under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software. That makes it a target for an application compatibility technology in Vista known as registry virtualization.
Many older Windows applications assume administrator access. This means reading and writing freely to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. This is not compatible with the Vista security model. To work around it Vista will intercept these requests and redirect them to a HKEY_CURRENT_USER key that looks identical. This way allows the application to work, and avoid asking for full administrative access via the UAC prompt.
There are a few rules 64 bit Vista uses for virtualizing registry reads and writes:
-The application must be 32-bit interactive process
-The key that is written to must be under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software
-The key requires administrative access to write to the key
-The application cannot be a service
These four conditions are met for our Automatic login utility. To fix it, we simply needed to make a slight change...that tells Vista that we really do want to write to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software key, and not a virtual one.
In the case of our autologin utility, it writes this key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
If the write is virtualized, windows will never see the change, and our program will have no effect. There is a special flag we can set to tell Vista - yes we really do want to write to that key. After that it now writes to the proper area on all 64 bit versions of windows.
Download from here to get your copy.
Many of our utilities fit this same criteria. Send me an email if you have a favorite that needs some 64 bit TLC, and I will put it to the top of the list.
Posted By: Steve Wiseman on Friday, August 08, 2008
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