diff --git a/RecentActivity/src/org/sleuthkit/autopsy/recentactivity/ExtractRegistry.java b/RecentActivity/src/org/sleuthkit/autopsy/recentactivity/ExtractRegistry.java
index cd2eefc4f4..3fd6142d53 100644
--- a/RecentActivity/src/org/sleuthkit/autopsy/recentactivity/ExtractRegistry.java
+++ b/RecentActivity/src/org/sleuthkit/autopsy/recentactivity/ExtractRegistry.java
@@ -29,7 +29,9 @@ import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
 import java.io.FileReader;
 import java.io.FileWriter;
 import java.io.IOException;
+import java.io.InputStreamReader;
 import java.io.StringReader;
+import java.nio.charset.StandardCharsets;
 import java.text.ParseException;
 import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
 import java.util.logging.Level;
@@ -1062,7 +1064,7 @@ class ExtractRegistry extends Extract {
         
         File regfile = new File(regFilePath);
         List<BlackboardArtifact> newArtifacts = new ArrayList<>();
-        try (BufferedReader bufferedReader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(regfile))) {
+        try (BufferedReader bufferedReader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(regfile), StandardCharsets.UTF_8))) {
             // Read the file in and create a Document and elements
             String userInfoSection = "User Information";
             String previousLine = null;
diff --git a/thirdparty/rr-full/plugins/samparse.pl b/thirdparty/rr-full/plugins/samparse.pl
index 8046708b3b..f8997b632f 100644
--- a/thirdparty/rr-full/plugins/samparse.pl
+++ b/thirdparty/rr-full/plugins/samparse.pl
@@ -23,6 +23,7 @@
 #-----------------------------------------------------------
 package samparse;
 use strict;
+use Encode::Unicode;
 
 my %config = (hive          => "SAM",
               hivemask      => 2,
@@ -364,7 +365,8 @@ sub _translateSID {
 #---------------------------------------------------------------------
 sub _uniToAscii {
   my $str = $_[0];
-  $str =~ s/\x00//g;
+  Encode::from_to($str,'UTF-16LE','utf8');
+  $str = Encode::decode_utf8($str);
   return $str;
 }