[Win32] Vista Permissions Issue with Effects

[Martin Andersen]

This may be a duplicate of Bug #176750, but this is more general and relates to the root cause:
Some Effects, such as Perspective, does not work under Windows Vista unless Inkscape is run as Administrator. Perspective (or the Python script rather) is trying to set a Registry value, which it doesn't have permission to.

[Ryan Lerch (ryanlerch)]

cant confirm this, as i cant get effects working at all on Vista

[sysFred (sysfred)]

Yes, it is what I experienced to. Effects work in general on windows Vista (rel. 0.45-0.46 eng), except "perspective"

[Simon Dahlbacka (simon-dahlbacka)]

The issue is that src/RegistryTool.cpp wants to write to HKLM to which normal users doesn't have access, and therefore perspective effect (and everything else that use registrytool) blows up.

Registy tool should probably use HKCU instead or HKLM and it should work even for normal users.

A manual workaround is to use regedit and go to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\inkscape.exe
and give full control permissions to Users
(right-click->Permissions->select Users, check Full control checkbox, Ok)

[Martin Andersen (msandersen)]

As a workaround, since I trust Inkscape, I simply right-clicked the executable and chose "Run As Administrator". That way Perspective etc works, altough I have to click that annoying Allow button every time.
The fix you propose sounds good.

[Simon Dahlbacka (simon-dahlbacka)]

Trivial patch that replaces HKLM with HKCU.

[Tom Davidson (tjd-mit)]

If this is tested as fixing the problem, it should be nominated for inclusion in 0.46

[Simon Dahlbacka (simon-dahlbacka)]

I'm running a private build with this patch and it fixes the problem.
 However, I cannot tell if it breaks something else (it shouldn't, but you never know..)

[Tom Davidson (tjd-mit)]

Assigning to Simon so he can get the bug-killing points when this is added to the tree :)

[ScislaC (scislac)]

Bryce,

This is a rather trivial patch and didn't break anything on an xp compile for me. Include it?

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Thanks, applied.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Dropping the 0.46 milestone on this since it's now included in the release branch.
Can someone please also apply this to the SVN head, so we can close the bug?

[Simon Dahlbacka (simon-dahlbacka)]

Per discussions in https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/187290 it seems that my patch doesn't work properly on XP.

[Simon Dahlbacka (simon-dahlbacka)]

2:nd try: This patch does not change away from HKLM as that seems to be documented (but not HKCU), instead it redirects the error messages to stderr. And at least for me python is still found and Perspective is happy.

Tested on Vista x86.

[Martin Andersen (msandersen)]

So if there are any other errors, the extension dies silently? If there is an error log somewhere, that would be OK. I would prefer not to see any console output; it looks so... Unixy. Ugh.