Canon IJ Scan Utility settings get overwritten by default settings - Fix

The Canon IJ Scan Utility is a common tool to receive documents from a scanner on your PC - which I use for quite some years already. You can set it up in a way that for example PDFs are getting automatically attached to a new email. But how can you prevent that your settings get overwritten?

I set up this tool for my parents before, since they only use the scanner to be able to send certain documents via email. However occasionally these settings seemingly get overwritten by the default settings. Not sure whether they accidentally hit the "Default" button or something else is causing it... 

However, after fixing it a few times manually I starting looking for an permanent solution. As I could find nothing via online search I got an interesting (old-school) idea myself.

I had to find out where there the settings are actually saved and it's here:

C:\Users\Andy\AppData\Roaming\Canon\IJ Scan Utility

In this folder there are two files:

UICOM.dat
UIVER.dat

And if you apply changes within the software the time of the "last change" affects these two files. Which led me to the following plan:

1) Set up the Canon IJ Scan Utility settings in the way it should be permanently used

2) Close the application

3) Navigate to the folder mentioned above

4) Go to the Properties of each file and mark "Read-Only"

5) Confirm for both files

6) Now you can test it:
- Open the Canon IJ Scan Utility
- Go to settings, reset settings to default
(Note that the settings initially indeed get reset to default, but...)
- Close the software
- Reopen it
- The default settings are gone, you previously "Read-Only" settings are applied (as the software only reads from these files when it opens)

Hope this can help you! In my case it did! :)