XP Home

[KGrumball]

Actinic won't run on XP Home in a restricted account. It apparently needs access to the registry, but even when I tried giving full permissions on the Actinic key under HKLM/Software/Actinic, it still complained. XP Home does not support the Power User group.

I don't want to run it as Admininistrator, so is there a work-around, please?

[wjcampbe]

Log in as yourself (normal user account) but use Run As to start Actinic. That gives you the isolation you need.

If you are not sure what I mean, just look up Run As in the XP Help & Support link.

[KGrumball]

The problem is that I don't want to give the password to the person running Actinic. Using "Run As" will still require me to give them the admin password. Or I'll have to do it manually every time, which is a bad thing. Ultimately, it's a crappy 'feature' of XP that it can't handle group permissions, but there's really no reason for Actinic to need to write to the registry every time it runs. If it does, then we need a work-around so that we can allow access to the necessary keys in the Registry (which could be set up by the installer in a future release).

While not many businesses will use XP Home, a lot of small traders and hobbyists will.

[NormanRouxel]

What version are you using? I think Actinic changed the way it uses the registry at 7.0.4. You may also find posts regarding this with a bit of searching. "Registry" would be a good keyword.

[wjcampbe]

Found MS have a toolkit (free) add-on for XP home that allows creation of user profiles - may be worth a try.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/s.../overview.mspx

[KGrumball]

The Knowledge base suggests a fix for Registry problems at http://knowledge.actinic.com/users/k..._204.html#aKB8 but that doesn't work any more.

The "Run As" does work, but defeats what I want to do as I have to turn up and type in the admin password every time.

[wjcampbe]

Have you had a chance to try the toolkit from post #5. That does look as though it will give the fuctionality you want, where you can create a profile for Actinic to run under, specific to the programme.

[wjcampbe]

Kevin,

Just came across these instructions for changing permissions on a registry entry, that should allow you to give the restricted user access to the actinic keys.

[KGrumball]

Have you had a chance to try the toolkit from post #5.

No, because it only allows additional restrictions. The problem with XP Home is that it disables all group permissioning, so users are either bog standard users, or administrators, with nothing in between. Adding further restrictions to users won't help, because it's already too restricted. Adding restrictions to administrators won't work because they can simply reverse those restrictions. Microsoft will never issue a tool that allows the functionality of XP Pro in XP Home.

Anyway to fix it I've found you need to give full access to the Users group for the following Registry keys. This also means propagating the changes to all the child keys (check the relevant box).

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Actinic
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Actinic Catalog v7