Accessing regedit without admin rights [closed]

Answer 1

Answer: No, you cannot run regedit.exe without administrative privs.

What you CAN do, is with C#, use the prebuilt libraries that allows you access to the Registry http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.win32.registry.aspx

Mind you though, you only have Read/Write access to HKEY_LOCAL_USER, and READONLY to everything else.

Answer 2

A modern regedit.exe (i.e. Vista+ with UAC on) has the unfortunate notion that it must be run "as an administrator" - I'm not sure if it's technically true that it must be an "Administrator", but this issue is a result of UAC and failed elevation.

This is a silly artificial restriction as the user has access (readonly) to most registry locations and write to HKCU. However, other than disabling UAC, which requires admin permissions and may be inadvisable, I do not how this restriction on regedit.exe can be bypassed.

1. It should be possible to use reg.exe (which is distributed with Windows), albeit without a nice UI.
2. Use a 3rd party registry editor/tool where this silly UAC elevation/restriction does not apply.
3. It may be possible to use regedit.exe from Windows XP which is not "UAC aware" - YMMV.
4. As suggested by sircapsalot, use managed API - perfect if already using C#.

Answer 3

You can run regedit without administrative privileges by launching it as a non-administrator. If you launch it as an administrator user, you get the UAC prompt, but if you launch it as a regular user, you get no prompt and most things outside of HKEY_CURRENT_USER are read-only.

regedit.exe is marked with <requestedExecutionLevel level="highestAvailable" uiAccess="false" />, which does not always ask for admin permissions, only if the current user is an administrator.

If you really need to run regedit as an admin user without admin rights, according to this thread, you can use the Compatibility Administrator tool to configure your system to ignore the requestedExecutionLevel.