While investigating some EFS settings I needed to look at the raw data in Group Policy settings files, usually called Registry.pol and located in the SYSVOL share for each GPO. First I tried to load it as any other hive in Registry Editor, but that did not work, indicating that .pol files do not use the same format as the Registry does.

After a bit of searching I found this excellent utility at the gpoguy.com website: Registry.pol Viewer Utility.

With it I could read (but not change) the information in my Registry.pol file.

The Registry.pol format is documented at MSDN.