The GAC Exposed
So you want to see what's in the Gac. Of course if you go to c:\windows\assembly in your explorer - you see a customized shell extension of the global assembly cache. If you want to see the actual files underneath, in the past I've always gone to the command prompt and dir myself into long file name oblivion.
To get rid of that shell extension, just add a new DisableCacheViewer registry entry (type DWORD) underneath the key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion and set the value to 1 and presto - it's gone. C:\windows\assembly has never looked so good. Of course, don't do this on your end users' machine as this is really just developer requirement to help figure out what's going on and what's really in the GAC.
If that doesn't help you debug your assembling binding problems - don't forget about FUSLOGVW.exe. But that's another blog entry for another day.