Windows OpenXR Loader will silently ignore API layers upon parsing a bad registry key

[mbucchia-msft]

When loading the list of API layers from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Khronos\OpenXR\1\ApiLayers\Implicit, the OpenXR loader will silently fail upon parsing a bad key. This can be reproduced by doing the following:

1. Add a DWORD key for API Layer number 1
2. Add a REG_SZ key (bad key)
3. Add a DWORD key for API Layer number 2

API Layer number 2 will not be loaded, but no error message is emitted (checked with both VS debugger and DebugView). This can cause very troublesome situations for API layer developers, especially when the "bad key" in question is the (Default) key not being set to an empty value (because that key is largely invisible to the naked eye).

[rpavlik-bot]

An issue (number 1833) has been filed to correspond to this issue in the internal Khronos GitLab (Khronos members only: KHR:openxr/openxr#1833 ), to facilitate working group processes.

This GitHub issue will continue to be the main site of discussion.

[BattleAxeVR]

@rpavlik Rylie, can you follow up on this please? much appreciated. I ran into this issue and it wasted several hours of my time, until mbucchia helped me. Having to hack the registry to get API layers to work again after Nvidia injected some junk key values is really a bad user experience.