Using the first link in your last post, we find this at the top:
As near as I can tell there are a wide range of hardware "issue's" that can cause this.
Hardware, as I expected. Going back to your original request, to search Google for "\Windows\System32\Congfig\System", well I tried that, but only got one hit, changing it to "\Windows\System32\Config\System" and looking at the second link to Experts Exchange, a fairly reliable site for tracking down issues, the final posts there also indicate hardware:
I had this AGAIN yesterday. different machine to last time but the same site and identical hardware.
I'm narrowing down to a hardware problem on the video card, power supply, or the mobo.
Also drive me nuts turned out to be some bad ide cables supplied with the motherboards.
While other issues could be the cause of some of these problems, there does seem to be a significant amount of solutions based on hardware problems, even bad cables. Which is what my experience would tell me - if the problem recurrs on a freshly formatted system, then hardware is likely the cause, especially if you're using cheap components. Make sure you have the latest XP-compatible BIOS firmware in your computer, try a different hard drive and cables, different RAM, etc. Again, good luck.
LOL
Yeah, thanks, I realize that I must have some piece of hardware which is "causing" this to occur. Unfortunately, not everyone can afford to spends the hours and money needed to track this down (for microsoft)!
As I mentioned earlier, this should be an "easy" fix for MS to resolve on the OS side! Things like this are taught in Programming 101!! Baring a catastrophic event, these types of situations should not occur, even if a random piece of hardware is the ultimate culprit.
This simply reinforces my original point of posting this to theis thread - as long as the user has no problems with his system (including installation which is quite nice), the system is very user friendly. Once a problem occurs, a good bit of knowledge/a lot of internet searching is needed to resolve the issues - not very different from Linux in that regard!!
I appreciate the time you took to look into this. But I really don't have the time / money to replace, one by one, each piece of hardware until the problem is discovered.