Unable to restore system

[ewthompson]

A couple days ago I decided to shut down the system instead of putting it in sleep. Upon start up, it performed a check disk which took about 35 minutes. I noticed after this action that there were issues with the wireless fuctionality, my Norton Antivirus showed expired (prematurely), and now I am apparently unable to perform a system restore, to any point. It simply states the system is unable to restore itself, and prompts me to choose another restore point. Any ideas??
Thanks,
EWT

[GomJabbar]

I've seen this happen before. I believe what's happening is that when the computer is shut down, for some reason Windows doesn't shut down normally. One or more of the windows registry hives could not be closed. You can check for this by viewing the userenv.log in the C:\WINDOWS\Debug\UserMode directory.

As a result, when you restart the computer, Windows has a flag that it did not shutdown normally the last time. So it loads a copy of the registry that doesn't have the latest info - such as your antivirus expiration date. Regarding the system restore point, I guess that information is stored in the registry as well. The safest thing to do is to perform regular backups to another medium, and not rely solely on system restore.

Microsoft has a utility that you can download from their website called UPHClean. Although I use it, I am not sure if this prevents the above problem or not. Below is an excerpt from the readme file:

> WHAT IS UPHCLEAN
> ================

> UPHClean is a service that once and for all gets rid of problems with
> user profile not unloading.

> You are having profile unload problems if you experience slow logoff
> (with Saving Settings for most of the time while logging off), roaming
> profiles that do not reconcile, or the registry size limit is reached.

> WHY DO PROFILES NOT UNLOAD?
> ===========================

> Many system and service processes do work on behalf of users. When
> the work is done the system or service process is responsible for
> releasing handles it has to the user profile hive. If this is not done by
> the service as the user logs off the profile cannot be unloaded.

> This problem in code can be caused by improper coding either in
> Microsoft software or 3rd party software (e.g. printer drivers, virus
> scanner service, etc). With the information provided by the system
> there is no way to find out what software needs to be corrected to allow
> profiles to unload.

[ewthompson]

GomJabber,

Thanks very much. I'll look into your possible solution.

EWT