Trying to edit the registry in Windows with a batch file

Question

I am supporting a few offices across the country running Windows XP. They are stand alone, no Windows Server or Active Directory, anything like that. I just switched them over to Google Apps, and in the process replaced Windows Live Messenger with Google Talk. I really want to stop Windows Live from being used, the platform sends so much spam and seems to have a lot of holes. I have tested making a registry edit to key

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\DisallowRun 

adding a string value msnmsgr.exe set to 1. I did it manually on one machine, and it worked, under both profiles, it wouldn't start Messenger. After my success, I wrote a .REG file thusly:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\DisallowRun]
"msnmsgr.exe"="1"

And a batch file, run from the same directory, written like this:

@ECHO off

REGEDIT.EXE /S msn.reg

It seems to write to the registry, but Live is starting. No idea what's happening. Seems this could have gone either way between Serverfault and here, but I went here since the Administration part seems resolved yet the little programming involved isn't working out.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Answer 1

Looks to me like you have the Registry value name and data swapped. According to the kb article, the REG_SZ value(s) should be named numerically starting with "1", and the included data would be the executable name ("msnmsgr.exe"). Thus, your .REG file should look like this:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\DisallowRun]
"1"="msnmsgr.exe"

Also, I would recommend that you use the REG.EXE program for simple edits like this, rather than importing a .REG file. For the change you wanted, your REG.EXE command would look like this:

reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\DisallowRun" /v "1" /t REG_SZ /d "msnmsgr.exe" /f