System Activity Sniffing?

Good day to you fellow earthlings :wave

I love using network sniffers like wireshark and urlsnooper because you learn so much about the chatter coming in and out of your computer, the benefits of being able to break down, analyse and understand such traffic are obvious.

Does a similar program exist to sniff out all activity on your local machine? Say for example:
'X service modified Y key'
'X.exe is created folder blah/blah/blah/tmp'
'X.exe is modified registry key at HKLM/etc/etc'
...and so on.

Ive searched for such a program but all i seem to find is clandestine pseudo-spyware / keyloggers which is not what im after, though of course input from HIDs may be included in the endless stream of info.

Id really love such a program to lift the skirt on my system and educate myself to whats going on underneath :drool
Any pointers would be much appreciated.

 

What used to be systernals, now microsoft processmon
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645

 

Oh yeah, now im in flavour country, thanks!