I've personally never seen a registry (software) problem that couldn't be resolved by reloading the O/S (software) from scratch. In fact, that's the process to determine if you actually have a hardware problem, so if you still have the problem on a virgin install of Windows, it's almost certainly either your hardware, or something else you're loading after installing Windows. Like I said we had one user that had a similar problem, we slapped a new install on there and everything has been fine since. If you have other websites claiming that the problem reoccured AFTER a virgin install of Windows, I'd like to look over them. Thanks.
Just google "\windows\system32\congfig\system" (or leave off system to get even more!!) There are about 3570 hits.
The funny thing about this - the system ran fine for about a year. About three weeks ago it started. I at first assumed a virus and checked everything. Nada. The system even restarted after going through the recovery console (but NOT all the other steps - didn't know about them!!). Since then it keeps recuring randomly. No new software/hardware etc... has been introduced (except windows updates) since Christmas (games for the kids).
Furthermore, it would seem that, since the registry is a critical component, that fallback copies would be made by the system, and, in the event of corruption, the steps needed to recover would be automatically run.
Suppossedly, this is what the hot fix was supoosed to do - AND - the hotfix was a part of the SP2, so, theoretically, I should never have seen this problem in the first place.
MS's tech gurus, after I informed them that the hotfix couldn't be installed as a newer version of it was already present, stated that I was stuck with the manual workaround. :((
Thus, if I were a non-tech type and this occured on my PC - I would not think that this was "user friendly"!!