How to prevent registry changes in Windows Vista

Security has always been one of Microsoft’s favorite marketing buzzwords, and never more so than when Windows Vista was introduced. But as it turns out, Vista’s security features are quite a bit more useful for protecting
your PC from itself than from any alleged intruders.

You can lock a registry key to prevent employees from installing software on a company PC, or prevent kids from disabling parental controls on a family PC.

Permissions also let you lock file type associations, preventing other applications from changing them. And by locking certain other keys, you can help protect your PC from viruses and spyware.

Here’s how you do it in Vista and windows 7:

• Open the Registry Editor, under the control panel

Navigate to the key you want to protect. You can’t protect individual values, but rather only the keys that contain them. This means that if you lock a key to protect one of its values, none of its values can be modified. You can, however, choose whether or not your changes are made to the subkeys of the selected key.

Right-click the key, and select Permissions.

Choose a user that you want to deny/allow to change the registry.  In the example below I chose “Users” then I checked the Deny  Full Control and Read permissions:

When you’re done, click OK in each of the opened dialog windows to commit the change. The change will take effect immediately.