The Windows registry is the backbone behind every Microsoft operating system of recent years, and it is this registry that controls the user configurations and general system settings that we’ve come to rely on over time. Without a Windows registry, it simply wouldn’t be possible to save anything for later use on a system reboot.

The registry stores data of all kinds, as well as extension information and user settings for every profile that has been setup on Windows. If you imagine a computer with ten different user accounts, which isn’t rare at all in a corporate or educational environment, the need for a central database to store all of those specific user details becomes all the more apparent. Without one, we’d have no way of storing each user’s configuration. This is where the HKEY_USERS hive becomes useful.

The HKEY_USERS hive is one of the most important and it stores two basic profiles. Firstly, the default configuration for new user profiles. That is, the generic settings that would come in to effect if you added a separate profile without making any user specific modifications. HKEY_USERS also controls the settings for the currently logged in user, which is just as important in the sense that a user profile is no good if we can’t deploy it and run off its settings!

If you access the registry directly in explorer mode, you will notice that the HKEY_USERS hive is broken down in to individual sub-keys. Every user profile will have its own sub-key, and if you expand this item, the user setting will be noticeable. Things can get quite clustered at this point as there are a lot of settings for each profile. This is to be expected when the sub-key handles just about every configuration from the user’s desktop wallpaper, to his or her Internet favourites and history.

If no additional profiles have been registered, Windows NT systems are programmed by default to show a “.default” sub-key inside the HKEY_USERS tree. This is the overriding profile when no other accounts have been setup, and so should naturally be treated with caution. A bad edit here can have a very bad effect on your ability to use Windows properly!

You may notice that when you login to a separate account and access the registry, besides from there being a list of settings under HKEY_USERS, you’ll also find an exact replica in HKEY_CURRENT_USER. This is necessary so that when you login, your user profile is taken from HKEY_USERS and copied in to a new table for easy access via the Windows registry. Don’t be fooled by the term replica or copy though. The data stored in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER table is actually a live reference mapping to the very same information that is stored in the HKEY_USERS hive.

What this means is that a change in one table will automatically affect the other. Consider this carefully before you proceed recklessly editing the current user settings without thinking about the impact it could potentially have on your long term HKEY_USERS hive.

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