A customer (thanks Grady!) reported that choosing Help->About->System Info on Vista causes a MessageBox to display “Microsoft System Info cannot be found or run.”
Why is that?
Simple investigation: run Regedit on WinXP and Vista to inspect this key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Msinfo
On Vista, the Type is REG_EXPAND_SZ and the Path is C:\Windows\system32\msinfo32.exe
whereas on XP it’s type is REG_SZ and the Path is C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\MSInfo\MSInfo32.exe
The MSDN topic Registry Value Types says that REG_EXPAND_SZ can include environment variables, such as %PATH%. However, the Vista value does not have any “%” in it.