Clean-rooming when software testing
code-analysis, stress-testing, testing
Solution
Since persistent modifications to the system is either in the filesystem on in the registry, you could have a little program that list all the files on the hard drive and also dump the registry. Then you can also do it after program operation and do a simple file diff. If you are using virtualbox, I think that you can do the mounting of the disk image offline (i.e. virtual machine not running). However dumping the registry from offline files may be harder. See "Mount vdi" on google.
Problem
I want to examine exactly how my code operates when using other libraries to which I do not have the code for. Whilst I can do this online (i.e. with FileMon, RegMon and TCPView from SysInternals), I was wondering if there was a good offline method that would allow me to run up my code in a virtual machine, shutdown the virtual machine and diff the entire VM image?