Reading Registry DWORD

[bonifale]

I'm going mad here; been googling and hacking for ages.......

I'm trying to read the value of a REG_DWORD from the registry using VB2008. The word contains a timestamp which is the number of seconds elapsed since 12:00 a.m., Friday, January 1, 1904. and is set to hex:c6156000 (dec:3323289600)

Whenever I read it the value -971677696 is returned.

The class below represents what I'm trying to do and works okay if I use a REG_SZ value instead. Sadly I can't change the type as it's created by something else.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Public Class CalDate
Public Shared Sub Main()
Const userRoot As String = "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE"
Const subkey As String = "Software\MK3 ESR"
Const keyName As String = userRoot & "\" & subkey
Const value As String = "Cal Due Date"

Dim int_ans As Int32 = Registry.GetValue(keyName, value, 42)

End Sub
End Class

 

[bonifale]

Just realised that the -971677696 value returned is in fact FFFFFFFFc6156000 which is the value I need but with the top two words set to FFFFFFFF.