Photoshop and Windows Permissions

[grandpubah]

Hi,

Let me start with the fact I know very little about Photoshop. I am the IT guy for a k12 school district. In our district we have a graphics academy which uses Photoshop as well as a host of other Adobe products. In order to maintain control over my network I use Windows system policies to restrict what students can do. I believe this is where my problems begin. I can find no documentation on what permissions a photoshop user must have. It appears that it wants the user to have read/write permisson to the registry. I know this is a general question but I am really looking for general advice. If you can give me some clues or point me to some documentation I would really appreciate it.

BTW...these are all Windows XP Pro clients.

Thanks,

Jon

 

[jimoblak]

XP Pro in k-12?... cool! You must be that one school district in the US with money.

Where are you finding that it needs registry access? Installation, starting, opening or saving a file?

The only file I have known Photoshop to modify is it's own config file, resident in the same folder (or subfolder) as the executable.

You might run into registry problems if a particular application that can handle graphics want to assume file type associations when it starts. Then when Photoshop starts, it also checks and wants to assume the same filetype association. (Like MS Paint and Photoshop fighting over BMP files)

There may also be a registry problem inherent in the way XP manages multiple users. Multiple users may require multiple registry entries during installation or first use. If you temporarily disabled your policies to allow Photoshop installation as the admin, you may need to temporarily disable the policies for the first start of the program for each XP user.

This is all probably a file association thing that is messing with the registry.

 

[ccdriver]

I'll pass on what I've found...

I added my students to the "PowerUsers" local group (on the local machine). (This was actually so they could run PageMaker.)

So far, I found that they can run PhotoShop, but their settings and preferences are not saved. Every time they log on and start PhotoShop, they get the same prompts about the "scratch disk" and Color Settings as if it was the first time the program had been run.

I experimented and added a "fake" student account to the local Admin. group and the settings were saved. I may let the kids use the same "fake" account under my watchful eye. I don't know enough about it, but maybe a tweak to Group Policies would allow them to be Admin. but then you could add whatever restrictions you need.