Jack R. Payton wrote: "I thought Win98SE had a System Restore program
which gives you the option of restoring your registry to an earlier point
when it was running correctly?"

Hal Trachtenberg commented: "This is only an option in Windows ME. It
never existed in Windows 98 or 98SE. However, one can still restore their
system to an earlier registry by using the scanreg/restore command from
either MS-DOS mode, or if I am not mistaken also from Start/Run, and
typing scanreg/restore. Windows backs up its registry on it's own.

Further comment (Jack R Payton): I'm sure Hal is right, at least up to a point.
Pre-Win ME versions did have both an auto backup of the registry, and the
scanreg /restore command to restore the registry to the *.bak version of
the registry. <snip> I suggested creating batch files to do a manual backup of
the registry files (system.dat and user.dat) in a different folder. That
way you would always have a reasonably useful set of registry files.

Doug comments:

Creating batch files is one way, but I use and highly recommend Emergency
Recovery System 9x (ERS9x).  After having been burned several times with a
un-recoverable corrupted registry (and backups) I tried ERS9x (shareware)
and now use it on all my machines.  It's advantage is that it makes one
copy per day of your registry. Also it can be used to make a copy of your
registry before installing any hardware/software that you fear may have bad
effects on your registry.

Recovery is simple and is performed from a DOS prompt so you don't even
have to be able to get into windows to recover. You can recover from any
one of the several backups that have been made in the past.  There are
several other backup frequency options and System file backups that it can
perform but the registry backup is its strong suit.

You can find it and some description at:

http://www.mslm.com/

Doug Simmons
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