Can a Service Write to Registry [HKLM]

Question

I am writing a service for Windows Vista/7 which needs read/write/delete access to the registry key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons

Are there any special considerations I must make just in case the target system has UAC enabled and the service must always run with administrator privileges?

The service is being written in VB.NET but C# code is welcome.

Thanks

Answer 1

User Account Control (UAC) only applies to users who are logged on interactively. A windows service will have the full security token (as opposed to the restricted one UAC generates for non-standard account users) available to it.

If your service is running as either Administrator, a member of the Administrators group or LOCALSYSTEM, it should have unrestricted access to HKLM. The only thing you may need to be aware of is registry redirection for 32bit processes running on 64bit Windows.