In my recent column "Microsoft Gets More Detailed About IE Vulnerability and Workarounds," one of the workarounds I describe is "Disable Row Position functionality of OLEDB32.dll." It involves deleting a specific registry key.

I tried this myself on one of my systems, and I wasn't able to delete the key. Even though I was logged in as Administrator, I got permissions errors when attempting to delete it. I examined the key's permissions and saw that Administrator, SYSTEM and users had only Read permissions. The only user with Full Control was TrustedInstaller.

Who is TrustedInstaller? I'm not completely clear on it, but it appears to be a process involved with Windows File Protection, the feature that prevents the modification or deletion of critical Windows files.

Vista support forums have lots of messages from people trying to delete or modify files or to which only TrustedInstaller has permissions. The same seems to be true of registry keys.

So what do you do? I found the answer in this MSDN thread. Essentially, I had to go into the Advanced Permissions dialog for the key and all subkeys, and to the Owner tab, and change the Owner to Administrator. Then I had to change the permissions on all these keys to allow Administrator Full Control. THEN I could delete it.