1. A method of detecting abnormal system states in computers, comprising: receiving snapshots from a plurality of software agents respectively residing on a plurality of computers within a population of computers, the snapshots including data indicating the state of assets including registry information in respective ones of the plurality of computers, wherein each registry information corresponds to a key and a unique indentifier; generating a hash for a normalizing the unique indentifier, wherein generating the hash includes: for each computer, indentifying a grouping of the registry information corresponding to unique indentifiers that are not duplicated across the population of computers, sorting the registry information within the grouping according to key names and the non-duplicated unique indentifiers for indentifying a relationship among multiple keys within each of the computers, and generating the hash based on the sorted instance of the registry information, wherein the hash is a substitute for the unique indentifier in generating the adaptive reference model; automatically generating an adaptive reference model comprising a rule set customized to characteristics of the population of computers, the rule set being developed by identifying patterns among the snapshots from the plurality of computers; and comparing a snapshot from at least one of the computers to the adaptive reference model to determine whether an anomaly is present in the state of the at least one of the computers.