Just google "\windows\system32\congfig\system" (or leave off system to get even more!!) There are about 3570 hits. 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.
You're an MS tech guy aren't you *G*??
They too claim this and ignore that NOTHING changed on the system since Christmas and suddenly, three weeks ago, this just starts happening.
The google results are the list of sites discussing this problem. One of them was pretty good, a bunch of "geeks" all trying to figure out what was causing this. A running thread since 2002. In it were all kinds of attempted solutions including wipe & install, exchange all hardware one piece at a time - changing BIOS settings for clock speed, standing on their head facing Mecca and reciting "there's no place like home" (okay, that wasn't in there!). NONE of it works.
BUT - even if there were a "hardware" problem (bad video card, etc...) the fact remains that the registry remains "volatile" in memory and is written back at shutdown - anything which hinders this process can result in a faulty registry. Something this critical should never be volatile!!
I fail to see how this lack of common sense in programming (commit/rollback) is the fault of hardware. It's a known problem in Windows 2000 & all versions of XP, yet MS "refuses" to fix it and forces the user to continually manually work around the problem.