How can you set time zone setting per user?

Question

Is there a way to set the time zone information to be unique for each Windows user? Like, a registry setting specific to that user.

For example, I want John to be CST and Mary to be PST. If John opens a program it says 5pm. If Mary opens a program it says 6pm.

Additional information: These users don't need to actually log in. I want to create two users, one for CST and one for PST, and use their credentials to run a program. The program will inherit their time zone settings and display the correct time.

More info: I plan on using these users in IIS for app pools so that different applications in the website can be run in different time zones and locales.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The only way Windows supports this is through Terminal Services, which won't help you. The time-zone settings are kept in the HKLM hive, and Terminal Services has a special setting that allows the Terminal Server to take a time-zone supplied by the incoming client-session and display that instead.

A better plan would be to use the timezone offsets in your code. StackOverflow is a better place to ask about that.

Answer 2

I haven't tried, but perhaps via cygwin you can use the TZ Environmental variable like under Unix/Linux. Env variables can be set on the command line by placing them before the command called - eg TZ=UTC xxxx.