The idea here is that you can pipe the output of virt-win-reg or hivexregedit --export through this program in order to display the strings more simply. Instead of: $ virt-win-reg --export ... [\ATI Technologies\Install\South Bridge\ATI_AHCI_RAID] "DisplayName"=hex(1):41,00,4d,00,44,00,20,00,41,00,48,00,43,00,49,00,20,00,52,00,41,00,49,00,44,00,00,00 you get: $ virt-win-reg --export ... | hivexhextostring [\ATI Technologies\Install\South Bridge\ATI_AHCI_RAID] "DisplayName"=str(1):"AMD AHCI RAID^@" However there are fundamental problems that make this a best effort process: there is no string encoding information in the registry, and the actual strings there are in a random set of encodings, mostly UTF-16LE, some ASCII or UTF-8, and a few in DOS codepoint encodings. Since there's no way to tell the encoding of a string, this tool doesn't get it right all the time. So it's good for viewing registry keys, but it doesn't preserve the fidelity of strings. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines. Tiny program with many powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top