Accessing the calling users Registry settings

First post on this board ! and what a good board it is , although I am a mod on UKweatherworld.co.uk if any ones interested in the weather.

Basically In my ASP page I need to test to see if the user calling the page has a certain piece of software on his/her desktop. This piece of software stores a setting within the registry and my thought was to try and examine the registry, thereby telling me what software and version is installed.

I cannot use cookies or anything like that .

Could anyone tell me whether this is possible or not ?.
All the users will be internal to the company I work for.
I've tried looking in various places and my initial thought is that this is probably not possible from a security point of view.

Thanks

Matt

Not only from a security standpoint it is not possible. ASP is server technology, and what you are requesting is client technology, therefore ASP is not the right tool for your request, you need to use a different technology for that, like writing an Active X component.

Hope this helps

an active-x component (or clientside vbscript) would do the trick, but it would narrow your browser compatibility to ie5 and higher only (no netscape/mozilla etc).

Thanks for you replies, luckly because it's a corporate intranet we can safely make the assumption that they will be using i.e5 or 6 only.
At the moment we use quite a lot of client-side scripting in both VB and javascript. Does anybody know the the commands or syntax that would enable me to do this ?. or a direction in which I might look ?.

Thanks

Matt Swift

Google "activex registry values" - there's heaps of 'em!

A bit late, but if you still need it: you could access the registry from client side script using the scripting.filesystemobject, i think