Changing the Registered User Details for Visual Studio 2010

One of the anoyances I’ve had when installing Visual Studio 2010 is the removal of the user information bit when accepting the License Agreement, this was useful but is now automated and the installer retrieves details from Windows itself.

After a fresh install of Windows 7 (with SP1 and it still needed updates afterwards) I installed my usual things along with Visual Studio, and thought now, how do I change the registered user details that show up in the about box, splash screen and are used as default values in the version resource. After having a quick poke around in the registry, I found the two areas that Visual Studio looks at. For a 64-bit machine they are the following two keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Registration\UserName
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\RegisteredOrganization

For 32-bit machines:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Registration\UserName
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\RegisteredOrganization

Changing these two will fix your about box, but what about that splash screen. Well running devenv.exe /setup with admin rights will cause Visual Studio to retrieve these registry settings and then make them appear in your splash screen. Making the circle complete which is what we set out todo. Hope that helps.

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