I have a Windows Server 2003 system that is used for terminal services. We do not use roaming profiles. We do not use login scripts. I have about thirty to fourty accounts that log into this system and as such have local profiles.
One of the software packages that are installed onto this system uses HKCU/Software reg tree for its licensing and so each user has the license key in their local profile.
How can I update all of these different profiles registries in a deterministic manner?
There are several ways to achieve what you want - one clunkier than the other. Terminal servers can be a deployment nightmare - users may not have rights to run msiexec.exe and hence MSI self-repair could fail. That's why I generally prefer to use batch files, scripts or reg files for the kind of situation you are facing.
I would use Microsoft's Active Setup feature. This is just a fancy name for a feature which allows you to "run something once per profile on login". Here is a good explanation: http://www.etlengineering.com/installer/activesetup.txt
Here is a sample active-setup entry for an MSI file (this is the content of a *.reg file):
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components\[ProductCode]]
"StubPath"="[SystemFolder]msiexec.exe /q /fou [ProductCode]"
The "StubPath" command can be anything "runnable", and in your case I would suggest not running msiexec.exe but rather a vbscript via cscript.exe or some other batch mechanism (CMD, REG, Etc...). The reason is what I stated above: msiexec.exe may not be allowed to run for terminal server users. In other words, something like this:
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components\MyProduct]
"StubPath"="[SystemFolder]cmd.exe /k C:\SomeScript.cmd"
There are other ways to add data to each user's profile such as using advertised MSI shortcuts and self-repair, but I wouldn't recommend that for terminal servers. See this serverfault.com answer for information on problems with the use of MSI files for registry settings.
Mount the registry hive programatically, change the keys, then close the hive. Alternatively, you could use PSExec/runas to run the "update the keys" script as that user, which also solves the "edit HKCU" problem
