C++ compiling crash

I work in a University and I am responsible for desktop images and application deployment. I have no practical knowledge of Unreal [4.91] or Visual Studio… Recently the lecturers have started teaching UnrealEngine C++ coding with Visual Studio 2013. We have experienced issues when selecting a C++ based project (the templates included in Unreal) it succeeds to create the project file only to fail while compling:

After several days of me and my colleague banging our heads against brick walls it turns out that if you disable access to the registry through User Group Policy even with Silent Writing to the registry enabled it will cause the C++ compiling to fail leave a project file that is no good.

If you set the User Group policy to allow access to the the registry the compiling will work…

Now from a security point of view in the education environment we would prefer the limit access to regedit to stop users breaking there own user data (some do attempt such things) but as a work around it appears successful.

Is this expected behavior?? Or should it be able to write without the user being able to use Regedit??

You might consider running PROCESS MONITOR from Microsoft… Process Monitor - Windows Sysinternals | Microsoft Docs – UE4 does use their own Unreal Header Tool (UHT) and its possible that it does indeed write to the registry. But, to find out for sure, I would see what Process Monitor shows…

Agreed though, having write access the reg in an educational environment is not too good.

teak

Cheers for the information any pointers are much appreciated.

Yes, we have already used procmon to identify the registry keys though even amending the perms to full control did not allow the application to run. The keys it is writing to are user keys so they have access anyway. With the GPO above set it would not run however with it set to allow access it would.

Adam

I guess I am confused… If when you compile it writes to the USER portion of the reg and that is writable why would it fail when you restrict access to other aspects of the reg unless the tool is using parts of the reg that is locked down…??? I think I am missing something…