So, while deploying IE 11, it became evident that something was happening in the IE settings that affected the display of certain webpages. Â If we ran an IE Reset in the browser and set all the default settings, the sites would work fine, but after a while a policy or some change was occurring to break websites. Â It isn’t easy to find the exact setting that is changing, so I thought, PowerShell’s Compare-Object would be great.
In PowerShell, its easy to get a data object that contains all the properties in a particular registry key. To return the IE settings, it is under HKEY_CURRENT_USER in Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer.  The PowerShell to get this data is:
[code]
Get-Item ‘HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main’
[/code]
From prior work, I knew I should be able to store this in a variable before and after a change and then compare the two objects. Â But every time I ran the Compare-Object on the two variables, there were no differences. Â I even manually changed data in one of the registry properties and got no differences.
What I found is that even though the registry key is stored in a variable, it actually pulls the live data – not a point in time snapshot of the data, as expected.
Instead, I came across an article from Guy Thomas that talked about Compare-Object and the registry and it suggests exporting the registry values to a .reg file before and after the change and then using Compare-Object.  This works like a champ.  Its a simple comparison of two text documents and makes quick work of what I was trying to accomplish.
The first step is to go into registry editor and use the File > Export command to create the before.reg file. Â Make sure you export only the select branch of the registry.
[code]
Compare-Object $(Get-Content before.reg) $(Get-Content after.reg)
[/code]
For screenshots and more details, see the post from Guy Thomas.
