One of the great things about being an IT professional is having an expansive list of remote tools at your disposal. While we all need more exercise, walking or worse traveling to a troubled user is not the sort of sporting activity we typically enjoy. The more remote tools, the better, I always say. One tool sorely lacking in previous versions of Microsoft Windows was remote registry support.
Since the registry does so much in Windows, it would be great to have control of it when a user needs help. For IT support pros looking to decrease wasteful walking or traveling time, Windows XP Professional offers an option that allows you to tweak a user's registry remotely. Standard warning Working with the registry yours or theirs is risky business.
Always make a backup copy before you begin making changes. Registry permissions While the process for accessing a remote user's registry is fairly straightforward, enabling or restricting access is a bit trickier. Right click on the Remote Registry Service one more time and select the Start command from the shortcut menu. The Remote Registry Service is now up and running. At the beginning of this article, I mentioned that there were some consequences to disabling the Remote Registry Service.
Ninety nine percent of the time, disabling the remote registry service won't cause any problems for you. There are a few applications out there that depend on it though. Another consequence of disabling the Remote Registry Service on a machine is that you lose some of your ability to remotely manage the machine.
Imagine for a moment that your company informs you that they are opening up a branch office in the middle of nowhere, near some place called Hogs Holler, Kentucky. Fortunately for you, you don't actually have to visit Hogs Holler. You simply preconfigure all of the machines and let the FedEx guy worry about finding the place. You setup the machines in your office, and since you are a security conscious administrator, you disable the Remote Registry Service.
You pack the machines up and ship them off to the country. The administrator in Hogs Holler receives the machines, plugs them up to the newly constructed network, and everything appears to work fine. After a couple of weeks though, someone from the branch office calls you and tells you that they are having a weird problem. You try to connect to the remote machines using Remote Assistance, but you suddenly realize that you forgot to enable Remote Assistance on those machines. No problem, there is a registry tweak that you can use to turn on Remote Assistance remotely.
Wait a minute. You disabled Remote Registry, so you can't even use the tweak. It looks like you are going to be taking the next Hillbilly Air flight to Hogs Holler.
OK, that's kind of a silly example, but the point is that if you do forget to enable remote assistance on a machine, you could normally use the Remote Registry service to enable Remote Assistance via a registry tweak.
If you have disabled the Remote Registry service though, then you have basically locked yourself out of that machine unless you physically travel to the machine. Author's Note Before you stop reading this article and go running off in a panic to disable the Remote Registry service though, you should know that there are some consequences to disabling the service.
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