What is Active Registry Monitor?

Active Registry Monitor (ARM) is a utility designed to analyze changes made to Windows Registry.

When installing software, you can create a copy of Windows Registry by means of ARM before the installation and another copy after the installation. Later you can compare the copies and see what changes the new software has made.

Besides, you can use ARM to analyze changes occurred to the Registry upon installation of new hardware, to compare respective keys on different machines, as well as to find out which key changes upon change of system settings or of settings in a software you are interested with.
You can use ARM to explore the Registry for the number and types of subkeys in any key.
ARM can be used to search for data of certain types and with certain modification time.
NEW! ARM now supports not only export to REG files, but also import, both in the old format and in the new one (Windows 2000, XP).
Now you can use ARM to compare REG files and to get the results in a convenient and understandable format. This feature is especially helpful when the REG files are big and manual comparing is very difficult.

Unlike Registry monitoring software (such as RegMon and Win-Expose Registry) and most uninstallers (CleenSweep, Uninstall, etc.) ARM compares full copies of the Registry made in different moments of time, whereas the above mentioned software monitor all accesses to the Registry within certain period of time and filter them, that sometimes results in errors, since other applications and system could also modify the Registry during the same time. The main ARM window looks like following:

ARM works with single file where you can store up to 100 scans (we tested up to 50 scans). With this "database" you can do such operations as search and comparison.

The program doesn't support such operations with different files!

ARM searches for differences on all levels: in Keys, in Value Names, and in Value Data. Results of comparison are displayed in three trees (see in Comparing registry copies).

Based on the results of comparison, ARM creates Undo and Redo files in *.reg format.
These files can be used to modify the Registry by switching from the newer copy to the older one and vice versa.
You can also modify registry directly from ARM without creating *.reg files

ARM deals only with root keys HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and HKEY_USERS, since the key
HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG is a copy of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Config\0000;
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT is a copy of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes;
HKEY_CURRENT_USER is a part of HKEY_USERS; and HKEY_DYN_DATA is (normally) used by the system only and is of no interest to a user.

To view the current state of a key, or to modify it, you can use Jump to Regedit function.

Contents of any key can be exported to *.reg file.