I Though i'd share this as there are almost no resources on the net on how to do this. I wrote this code to overcome the limitation of some programs looking for HKCU (NTUSER.DAT) for their config, and ignoring HKLM. A few interesting facts about user reg hives: HKU\.DEFAULT is not the default user's profile, it is the SYSTEM profile! All Locally stored user profiles can be found in HKU under the account's SID The Default User's profile is the ONLY user profile registry hive NOT mounted to HKU