ROT registration does not work with adobe 11 installed

Question

I have code that we've been using for years with PDFs, HTML docs, and XBRL docs. The code is called from either a BHO in IE, or an Adobe plugin in Reader. It registers a moniker in the ROT, and creates a signalling event.

We've been trying to upgrade from Adobe 9 to Adobe 11, and the debugging the code, it simply fails to register the moniker in the ROT. It works if called from an Adobe 9 plugin, and if called from the BHO. But simply upgrading to Adobe 11 is enough to make it start silently failing.

The code in question is below:

void CLocatorRegistration::Register( ISourceLocator* pLocator, long nKeyFile )
{
    HRESULT hr;
    CComPtr<IRunningObjectTable> pROT;
    CComPtr<IMoniker> pmk;
    CComBSTR bstrName;

    // access the ROT
    pROT = GetROT();

    // create the moniker
    pmk = CreateMoniker( nKeyFile );

    // put this object in the ROT. 
    _ASSERTE( !m_bRegistered );
 ->>hr = pROT->Register( ROTFLAGS_REGISTRATIONKEEPSALIVE, pLocator, pmk, &m_dwROTCookie );
    if FAILED(hr)
        throw hr;
    m_bRegistered = true;

    // create the event and signal it, to support notification to any callers that this object
    // is now available to connect to
    CreateEventName( nKeyFile, bstrName );
    m_hEvent.Attach( ::CreateEvent( NULL, TRUE, FALSE, bstrName ));
    ::SetEvent( m_hEvent );
}

The highlighted line is the ROT registration, and the return is S_OK. Does anyone have any idea why the method would succeed, but the entry not be placed into the ROT?

Answer 1

The problem that I found in researching this was the fact that Adobe 11 includes a new sandboxed protected mode setting. When developing a plugin, it no longer by default has access to the OS.

For our purposes it was quite simple just to disable this setting, as this is for an internal application. There are a lot of other ways to accomplish this, but we didn't look into them because of time constraints.