We have an installer that's setting up a windows service that runs under a different user account, and it's going to be configured with some pretty sensitive values we'd like to protect as well as possible.
We'd like to store those values in the user's environment variables, but the user running the installer is not always going to be the user under which the service runs.
I'm not finding much information online about user A configuring environment values for user B. Is it possible?
It’s doable. The variables are stored in the registery under the users profile/Environment. You will need to get Sid of the user so you can find their entries in the registers. Then you can update.
A better approach would be to create application registery entries, and set the permissions on them to the desired account.
A potential problem with the environment variable approach is that if the applicable user account is not logged on when the installer runs then the account's profile may not be loaded and so the registry data would not be available. Working around this problem would require enabling the installer to logon the user account and load its profile.
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