The Windows Registry is a bit of a nightmare. After years of using Windows, the majority of users are still fairly clueless how the Registry works and daren’t attempt to make manual changes to their Registry. Make the wrong change and you might find your system simply refuses to boot.

You could use a Registry tweaker to examine your Registry and make changes on your behalf. However, these tools look for common or obvious errors such as a missing file or a filetype that is pointing to the wrong application (or missing application). Your Registry is much more powerful than this and one installed application can use your Registry to find and call many different keys (to examine whether the application is commercially-licensed, to access files from other applications, to locate filetypes and more).

Regmon is a Registry monitoring tool that will show you which applications are accessing your Registry, which keys they are accessing, and the Registry data that they are reading and writing - all in real-time. This functionality will take you one step beyond what standard Registry tools can do, as you can see and understand how programs use the Registry. With Regmon you'll see how the values and keys changed.

Note that, due to a recent purchase of Sysinternals (manufacturer of Regmon) this application may not remain as freeware in the future, so download Sysinternals software soon.