May 10th, 2012

Cheap amusement: Searching for spelling errors in the registry

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

One source of cheap amusement is searching for spelling errors in the registry. For example, one program tried to register a new file extension, or at least they tried, except that they spelled Extension wrong.

And they wonder why that feature never worked.

My discovery was that my registry contained the mysterious key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\S. After some debugging, I finally found the culprit. There was a program on my computer that did the equivalent of this: 

RegCreateKeyA(HKEY_CURRENT_USER, (PCSTR)L"Software\\...", &hk);

One of my colleagues remarked, “With enough force, any peg will fit in any hole.”

I suspect that the code was not that aggressively wrong. It was probably something more subtle.

Category
Old New Thing
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Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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