To quote from an official page of the site: "A portable app doesn't leave registry entries behind except those automatically generated by Windows".
But this isn't true of everything available here, for instance Skype and the utilities from Sysinternals (Microsoft), and possibly others. And Skype, even in the portable version, still puts things in the user's profile on the system partition.
Just noting this. These items are still much lighter weight than their non-portable variants.
djc
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The wording of that phrase from this site is quite intentional: it says "leave registry entries behind", it does not say that the registry is not touched.
Many of our apps use the registry or Windows filesystem because the app upon which it is based does so. What we do that makes the app portable is that we ensure that registry entries, folders and files specific to the base app are removed from the PC when the app is closed, and take them along with the app to be used on the next PC on which you run it.
Please note that this does not include registry entries or files created by Windows itself, or by other programs such as antivirus and firewalls.
If you do see something such as a file, folder or registry after the PortableApp has been allowed to completely close itself (that is to say that AppNamePortable.exe is no longer running in Task Manager, and was not crashed either intentionally by killing the process or unintentionally by doing something like shutting down Windows with the app still running) then you may have found a bug, and it would be worth reporting such things in the app's appropriate support sub-forum.