After going through the process of generating a microsoft authenticode signing certificate (spc) using Thawte, I was already to incorporate code signing into our build process. One problem. Where is my .pvk file?

The private key is generated during the certificate request process. Thawte never actually has access to your private key (this is obviously a good thing and by design). Unfortunately I originally went through the reqest process from my Vista dev. machine. Due to restricted security permissions,

Vista not only saves the private key into the registry (I knew this before hand and was ok with it), but it also meens that the private key can not be exported from this machine.

Thawte has a known issue article about this, but I’d failed to read it before hand.

The work around … re-issuing the certificate, but this time, placing the re-issue request from our build machine where the pvk is easily exportable.