The HKEY_USERS Key
The HKEY_USERS key contains all actively loaded user profiles. In this case, the key
contains the following subkeys: the .DEFAULT subkey, <Security ID> subkeys for all
user accounts currently logged on to the system, and <SID>_Classes subkeys that
contain file associations and COM classes for specific SIDs (Fig. 7.23
).

Figure 7.23: The HKEY_USERS key structure

Note More detailed information on the contents of the HKEY_USERS registry key will
be provided in Chapter 10
.
The data from the .DEFAULT subkey is used if no one is currently logged on to the
system. The .DEFAULT subkey contains the same subkeys as the
HKEY_CURRENT_USER key. These keys were listed in Table 7.3
.