Question

I’ve checked some other replies on SO but as far I can see, this is a different issue than the hits I got.

When I open RegEdit, I can see a set of keys but when I list them from my program using e.g.:

Registry.LocalMachine.OpenSubKey(@"SOFTWARE").GetSubKeyNames()

some of them are missing. I thought it might to do with the access rights so I checked .CurrentUser too. The same behavior can be experienced there. A few of the subkeys are just not listed.

What am I missing?

Answer 1

Is your OS x64? If that is the case, for “LocalMachine\Software” there are two different nodes: Normal for x64 apps and Wow6432Node for x86 apps.

A sample application to demonstrate the above.

using System;
using Microsoft.Win32;

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
  internal class Program
  {
    public static void Main()
    {
      String[] values = Registry.LocalMachine.OpenSubKey(@"SOFTWARE").GetSubKeyNames();
      foreach (String value in values)
                Console.WriteLine(value);
    }
  }
}

This is the output of the code on my machine when the console application is built in x86:

Adobe
AGEIA Technologies
Alcohol Soft
Apple Computer, Inc.
Apple Inc.
Aureal
Avira
Azureus
BazisSoft
C07ft5Y
Canon
Citrix
…

This is the output on my machine when the console application is built in x64:

7-Zip
AGEIA Technologies
Apple Computer, Inc.
Apple Inc.
ATI Technologies
Canon
Classes
Clients
…

As you see, the outputs vary a lot based on whether the application is x86 or x64.

EDIT:
A similar question was asked on StackOverflow previously.