Sergey Filippov’s excellent Registry editor and search tool Registry Finder has hit version 2.18 with some major additions.

The big news is that searches now run independently of everything else. There’s no need to sit and wait for a search to complete: you can browse other parts of the Registry, carry out edits or other tasks while the search continues.

This includes the ability to work with search results. You can examine and take action on the first results immediately, even as the search carries on in the background.

You can even have multiple searches running simultaneously, each in their own thread and with their own results window.

There’s no special setup required, this works automatically. Press Ctrl+F, type a search term, hit enter, a search is launched in one tab; press Ctrl+F again and repeat the process to open a new tab and run another search immediately. (You can also opt to run searches one at a time, if you prefer.)

Run multiple sophisticated Registry searches all at the same time

This release has another welcome time-saving addition in “greedy deletion”. Run a Delete action which affects multiple keys and the program won’t stop to raise an alert on the first key with a problem. Instead it deletes everything it can first, so if you expected an issue with this key you can safely abort the action and know everything else has been wiped.

There are also three bug fixes, two resolving possible crashes and one addressing what sounds like a major export issue (“for the Export command, the Registry Hive file format was unavailable”.)

Registry Finder is a freeware application for Windows XP and later.