Recently, I had to do something I never had to do before: read the Windows registry from Java. I would have thought this would have come up at some point in my career, but there's a first time for everything.

I ended up using an open source project based on JNI called jRegistryKey - http://sourceforge.net/projects/jregistrykey/. It's super simple to use, you have to drop a DLL somewhere on the Windows path, put a jar on your classpath and then simply use the API and it works like a charm.

Attached a little code snippet that demonstrates the use.