Python Winreg not showing in registery editor

Question

I've been working on the script for a couple days now, and for some reason I am struggling with my my code to work properly. When I run the python code the program is suppose to add a value to a key in the windows registry; however, that doesn't happen in there. I ended up looping the values to see if its on python side and the program spits out my values I've placed so I'm not sure.

Output:

('notepad', 'notepad.exe', 1)
('PythonTestFile', 'explorer', 1)
('testpurpose', '1', 1)
('notepad.exe', 'notepad.exe', 1)

Windows Registry

CODE

import winreg
#connecting to key in registry
access_registry = winreg.ConnectRegistry(None,winreg.HKEY_CURRENT_USER)

access_key = winreg.OpenKey(access_registry, "SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Policies\\Explorer\\DisallowRun", 0, winreg.KEY_ALL_ACCESS | winreg.KEY_WOW64_64KEY)
#accessing the key to open the registry directories under
for n in range(20):
   try:
      x = winreg.EnumKey(access_key,n)
      print(x)
   except:
      break
   
try:
   winreg.SetValueEx(access_key, "testpurpose", 0, winreg.REG_SZ, "1")
   winreg.CloseKey(access_key)
except Exception as e:
   print(e)

I've tried multiple videos and looked through the documentation, but I'm not sure where I'm going wrong. I even switched between the 64x and 32x with the permissions and tried restarting my computer multiple times, and nothing seems to work. The only thing I can think of is it has the wrong path. If you could help that would be awesome!

Answer 1

I ran into the same thing. Looks to be affected by the fact that I'm using the python build provided from the Microsoft Store, and its problems are documented here: https://docs.python.org/3/using/windows.html#redirection-of-local-data-registry-and-temporary-paths

I monitored the process with Process Explorer and it showed that opens of the registry were being redirected to a silo-ed location. o_O