CeRegSpy is a utility for monitoring all registry operations on a device running Windows CE OS. CeRegSpy lets you see at run time how applications and OS read and write registry. CeRegSpy intercepts and prints all calls to system registry API made by applications and OS itself. CeRegSpy is designed to help developers, administrators and power users to debug and troubleshoot applications and drivers and study system behavior.

Windows CE system registry is a hierarchical database used to configure the system for applications and hardware devices. The registry contains information about installed applications, drivers and available hardware. The operating system continually references this information during operation. Missing or invalid registry values may cause various failures of the system, drivers or applications. Other values can be modified (tweaked) to achieve desired system behavior.

Windows CE OS does not provide any tools to study which registry values are used and how they affect system, application or driver behavior. Therefore, it is very difficult to troubleshoot such common problems, such as incorrectly configured COM objects or device drivers. Such errors may cause application or hardware failures resulting in meaningless error messages or no messages at all. That's why CeRegSpy was designed to print all accesses to system registry on system-wide basis.

With CeRegSpy developers can see which registry values are accessed and which are missing. Administrators and power users can discover undocumented or little known system settings, which can be tweaked to adjust system behavior. System integrators building custom Windows CE based devices will find CeRegSpy useful when preparing and troubleshooting system registry for the operating system itself and for third-party components.