The WOW6432Node effect

Last night I was playing around with "Adding Commands to the Communicator Menus" and before I got it running I ran into an obstacle . Basically I wanted it to add extra menu entries in the Communicator menus.

The way to do this is by adding a following registry entry

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Communicator\SessionManager\Apps\[GUID of Application]

and some keys

Name (Type:REG_SZ) to specify menu caption
ApplicationType (Type:DWORD), value can be either 0 (if application is executable) or 1 (if application is protocol)
Path (Type:REG_SZ) to specify full path to the executable
SessionType (Type: DWORD), value can be 0 (for local session), 1 (this is default for two party session) or 2 (for multi-party session)
ExtensibleMenu (Type:REG_SZ), value can be MainWindowActions, MainWindowRightClick (this is default value), ConversationWindowActions, ConversationWindowContextual (this is the default value) and ConversationWindowRightClick. Multiple values can be specified separated by semi-colons

So I started up a registry editor and added the above mentioned keys and launched my Office Communicator. But the "Contoso Sales C..." entry was missing. I did spend some time checking up on typos but came no where. So I decided to make use of Process Monitor to look for what kind of registry activities Office Communicator was having. Surprisingly the activities were only in this part of the registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Communicator. Just for the fun I moved my registry entry to this location and the entry in the Office Communicator worked like a charm.

The explanation for this I found on Windows IT Pro: "The Wow6432 registry entry indicates that you're running a 64-bit version of Windows. The OS uses this key to present a separate view of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE for 32-bit applications that run on a 64-bit version of Windows."

If you want to read more about customizing your Office Communicator the following links can useful for you.

Integrating a Third-Party Collaboration Program with Communicator 2007

Adding Commands to the Communicator Menus