I'd like to help answer the questions regarding registry access under Vista. At JKI, we recently had to tackle this and other Vista compatibility issues for VIPM which of course is written in LabVIEW. I have to say with confidence that you can create a Vista compatible application in LabVIEW. You just have to do your homework of course.
For starters, I suggest that anyone wanting to write a LabVIEW application for Vista, please read this document... and any other related documents on that site. Read them a few times until it sinks in. The moral of the story is that you should not write an application that requires elevated privileges on Vista (run as admin). If you do this then you must have a very very good reason to do it. Writing to the registry is not a good enough reason. Applications should not use the registry to store transient data.
Writing to the Registry:
Standard user level applications cannot write to the registry anywhere. If you absolutely must write to the registry then one option is to create a separate small executable that performs the write. This executable can be elevated by including a manifest after the build, or during the build (in LabVIEW 2009). You can call this separate executable from your main executable. When you do this, the end user will see an elevation prompt and will have to approve the registry write action. Using this method, you could also perform a registry delete action.
So, do you really still need to write to the registry? Probably not.
