Environment variables in Windows 2000

JG jgass at dclab.com
Tue Dec 4 13:31:00 EST 2001


It was possible to modify the parent's environment up until Win 98"
using the STRINGS utility.

  "strings" was able to trace a pointer to it's PSP [program segment
prefix block] locate it's parent then trace the parent's PSP back to
the original master environment block and then appended the new user
environment variable and value to the end of the environment strings.

I use strings extensively to set new environment variables. 
It doesn't work properly in Windows 2k though - sometimes I get an
"out of memory" error, but it will never set a user variable.

It is available as freeware

STRINGS 2.2 Copyright 1991, 1992, 1993 Douglas Boling
First published in PC Magazine, December 29, 1992

If anyone out there has any other ideas please let me know.

Joseph Gass



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