Need help with a Registry "Hack"

NateS

TPF Noob!
Joined
Sep 27, 2007
Messages
2,750
Reaction score
39
Location
Missouri
Can others edit my Photos
Photos NOT OK to edit
Okay...I'm having an issue at work and need some help.

We have a program that needs to be installed and it needs to be installed under each user (it's actually a manual update that we need to run). So, I'm wanting to set the program so that it will automatically run/update once PER USER and then delete. Adding the entry to the Run Once section removes it after it is installed under the first user so it doesn't get updated for all the other users. Obviously, adding it to "Run" never deletes it and it will run every time every user logs in.

Is there a section of the registry that I'm missing where this is possible? If not is there somewhere else I can do this easily. It will take forever to log in and do the update for every user on every computer. I'm hoping somebody here can help cause I don't feel like joining a Computer forum for one question.
 
We'd normally do that sort of thing using Group Policy, but I think I'm right in saying that only works with MSI files, not EXE. How many users are you talking about?
 
Probably about 30 users and 6 machines that this needs to be done on. I can do it manually but it will kill an entire day or more. I was hoping there would be an easier way to set it up to run for each user on their next logon. There's actually 2 files that need to be run and yes...both are .exe's.

Actually, there are about 35 machines this should be done on, but about 6 that it needs to be done on fairly soon.
 
Think you're going to end up doing that manually with that scale of operation to be honest. We've got some 1,300 devices spread across 15 sites in Saudi (really big country) and even we end up doing some stuff manually.
 
Think you're going to end up doing that manually with that scale of operation to be honest. We've got some 1,300 devices spread across 15 sites in Saudi (really big country) and even we end up doing some stuff manually.

Wow, big network. Ours is small at about 100 devices spread over 4 counties. I guess I'll just tough it out and do it manually. Thanks for the help.
 
You should have seen us upgrading from NT to Win 2003/XP - the networks was only half the size then...
 
I could ask a few questions of the engineers at work, but it's now our weekend (Thur/Fri). Can you hold till Saturday? They might know of a free remote deployment tool you could use. Could you give me a bit of detail on the network set-up you have? Windows, Linux, single domain, client OS etc... anything like that might help them advise.
 
Well, I'm going to try to do them today and tomorrow, but these are in courtrooms and it's hard for me to get in there to do the updates since court is in session the majority of every day. That was the main reason for this thought.

Our workstations are all running Windows XP SP2 and the Network is Novell 5.1. I'm thinking that something like ZenWorks would do the trick, but I can never get the Administrator to install it as he's afraid of messing something up in the active network (I'm only the Asst. Network Admin so I don't have a ton of say....only pursuation).

I'm acutally thinking that I will just throw the paths to the two executables in the RUN folder in the registry then as quickly as I can log in each user. Then when I'm done I'll delete those registry entries. This would save me the time of browsing to the folder and running each .exe and probably cut my time in half.
 
Nate, what about the run_once registry branch?
 
Nate, what about the run_once registry branch?

It only run's once per machine total....I need it to run one time for each user. User "A" log's in and it runs but never again when user A logs in. Then when user "B" logs in, it runs under that user one time, and so forth with the rest of the users.
 
Without using group policues, you could drop a batch file in each users Startup folder (C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\). You could either make the last step of the batch file to delete itself, or you could create a logfile and program the batch file not to run if the log file exists. If you can map to each PC and go through the Documents and Settings folder, it should be easy to do remotely. Also this is assuming that users always use the same PC. Does the update need to run if the user is signing on for the first time?
 

Most reactions

Back
Top