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"!!
That's hardly a listing of people who have reloaded Windows from scratch and are still having the problem, that's the location of the registry and probably has more hits than you listed.
The funny thing about this - the system ran fine for about a year.
Not funny at all and makes perfect sense, sounds like something you're loading or doing is causing the problem. Didn't happen for a year, so something that happened just prior to the problem reoccuring would be the root issue. Good luck figuring it out.