I was doing some programming recently and had to store some values in that behemoth that is the windows registry, usually that’s pretty straight forward, not so much this time.

Windows has this little system (WoW64: windows on windows 64bit) that lets you run 64 and 32 bit processes at the same time, it is basically an emulator that wraps up the 32bit processes in their own address space (if I understand correctly). This is all fine, except that in order to do so, they have separated out the registry so that 32bit processes running on a 64bit machine will be sent off to a totally different key to get their values.

Thanks to the powers of the internet and a ‘Vadim’, I discovered why all my reg keys kept disappearing on my clients server.

Below is the link to the article that solved the problem for me
WoW64 and the registry. « Vadim’s Weblog.

Thanks Vadim.