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Previously, I wrote about the FLAGS switch for REG.EXE in Vista and covered a technique that would set the virtualization-related flags of a registry key programmatically. This post intends to cover the other side - querying for the virtualization-related flags of a registry key. Again, we're dealing with an "undocumented" function in NTDLL.DLL - NtQueryKey:

NTSTATUS NtQueryKey(
  IN HANDLE KeyHandle,
  IN KEY_INFORMATION_CLASS KeyInformationClass,
  OUT PVOID KeyInformation,
  IN ULONG Length
  OUT PULONG ResultLength );

typedef enum _KEY_INFORMATION_CLASS {
  KeyBasicInformation,
  KeyNodeInformation,
  KeyFullInformation,
  KeyNameInformation,
  KeyCachedInformation,
  KeyFlagsInformation,
  KeyVirtualizationInformation,
  MaxKeyInfoClass // MaxKeyInfoClass should always be the last enum
} KEY_INFORMATION_CLASS

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A while back, there was a topic (Virtual Registry vs. "Real registry") in the Sysinternals Forums that brought up the question of how to set the virtualization-related flags of a registry key programmatically in Vista, rather than through the use of the REG.EXE tool's FLAGS switch. (For more information on the flags, see Mark Russinovich's article in TechNet Magazine, "Inside Windows Vista User Account Control"). Even before that topic in the forum, I had wondered how it was done but had not had a chance to explore. It didn't seem that many others were curious about it. That topic had resurrected the idea, but it quickly fell to the bottom of the list. I've finally gotten around to experimenting, and that leads to this write-up. I still don't see much in the way of this discussed anywhere, by searching for terms involved (data types, function param names, etc.), so hopefully this will help