Why does regedit give different results from reg query?

Question

I have jdk 1.6 installed on my machine and have a discrepancy between regedit and reg query. From regedit I have the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JavaSoft\Java Development Kit

but if I try

reg query "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JavaSoft\Java Development Kit"

I get:

ERROR: The system was unable to find the specified registry key or value.

From regedit HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JavaSoft has the following children:

Java Development Kit
Java Plug-in
Java Runtime Environment
Java Wb Start
Prefs

But reg query "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JavaSoft" has the following results:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JavaSoft\Auto Update
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JavaSoft\Java Plug-in
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JavaSoft\Java Runtime Environment
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JavaSoft\Java Update
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JavaSoft\Java Web Start
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JavaSoft\Prefs

So there are keys missing from regedit that show up in reg query and others that are missing from reg query that show up in regedit.

Any ideas why these could be different?

Answer 1

Try running reg from a console with administrative privileges.