I use PuTTY a lot. I manage a lot of servers for my work, and I have a separate session for each one. I recently ran into a problem where a significant number of my sessions were rendering weird characters compared to some of the others. After troubleshooting for a while, I finally found information that said PuTTY was possibly the culprit. Since I had some sessions working, but others were acting strange, I started poking through the settings trying to figure out what was different in PuTTY.

After banging my head for a bit, I decided there had to be a better way. I did some searches, and I couldn't find anything on the internet that would do exactly what I wanted to do, which was compare two registry keys to see what values were different. I could eyeball it, of course, but why not let the computer do the hard work for me? Since I couldn't find a pre-packaged solution on the web that specifically worked with registry data, I decided to write my own. Introducing Registry Key Diff. It's a very simple tool that allows you to compare two keys to see what might be causing your problems. For me, it ended up being a character encoding issue, but some of my sessions were configured properly, while others were not. I used the new tool I wrote to copy the encoding setting to all of the other sessions, and everything is happy now.

Anyway, I figured I'd clean up the application and share it with everyone. Who knows who might be out there needing to do something similar to what I wanted to do. If you're interested, head on over to the application page to download it and check it out.

Happy Comparing!