Scripting

I have found that Smart Ink Tools Addin for Office 2010 fails to load properly if the user is prompted to enter a Username and Userinitials when an Office product is first started. In the effort to prevent this prompt from happening, I have found that some registry values need to be present. Namely:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\Userinfo\Company
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\Userinfo\Username
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\Userinfo\UserInitials

Configuring these values as a REG_EXPAND_SZ allows me to user the %username% variable as such:

reg add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\Userinfo /v Username /t REG_EXPAND_SZ /d "%%username%%" /f

Which ends up working great. When I start Office, the REG_EXPAND_SZ is expanded, and is replaced with a REG_SZ equal to the username.

However, I am having an issue with the UserInitials part. My attempt is:

reg add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\Userinfo /v Username /t REG_EXPAND_SZ /d "%%username:~0,2%%" /f

Which should get the first two characters of the Username variable. This works when testing in a cmd prompt, but when the REG_EXPAND_SZ ends up expanding, it only drops the first character in the resulting REG_SZ. I tried %username:~0,3% with the same results.

Does anybody know what is going on here?

UPDATE:

Tested with %username% as the value for both UserName and UserInitials, and found that it preserved the keys (not replacing them as I had thought). It seems that the issue is with regards to the substring selection idea, %username:~0,2%. If I have that configured as one of the values, it fails entirely and replaces my keys with the default keys, which is the username, and then the initials.