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I've encountered issues with an application having multiple places where it can save certain settings but it appears that they are sometimes not sticking.

I'm fairly sure they are being stored in the Windows Registry and thus I'm curious if there is a free tool that "monitors" / listens to writes/edits to the registry.

Ideally using such a tool would help me identify which parts of the application are correctly storing the settings and which are not (for whatever reason).

For the record I don't need to intercept/block or alter the edits, I just want to know when and where they happen.

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Process Monitor will do exactly what you want (and more).

You may also find SpyMe Tools interesting. It lets you create before/after snapshots and compare them to see what changed.

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I've never used SpyMe Tools, but I have used Regshot to do the exact same thing and it works great. sourceforge.net/projects/regshot – Shinrai Feb 17 '11 at 20:03
SpyMe Tools will also monitor the filesystem. The only annoying part is that you can't create snapshots for both fs & registry at once, but that's a relatively minor complaint. – afrazier Feb 17 '11 at 20:31
+1 for Process Monitor. :) – techie007 Feb 17 '11 at 20:51
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I use Process Monitor, I've used it for diagnosing bad application behaviour, checkout the article on my blog which may help you use it http://joelmansford.wordpress.com/2008/07/30/ms-dynamics-crm-40-client-configuration-wizard-fails-with-%E2%80%9Coutlook-is-not-set-as-the-default-mail-client%E2%80%9D-on-windows-server-2008-x64/

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