What about all the files programs stick in C:\windows and/or C:\windows\system?  I don't believe everything would be back to business as usual.  When I've had crashes in the past, as much as I hated to do it, I've reformatted and reinstalled.  It kills me to have to reinstall all the software, peripherals, and PCI cards.  For that reason I bought Goback from the original developer, Wildfile, which was bought out by Adaptec and is now Roxio.  It has saved me from big crashes and small ones.  It runs during the boot so that if Windows won't run you can still roll back your hard drive to a time when it did.  I've done that a couple of times when I got the message "you need to reinstall Windows".  I simply rolled my hard drive back an hour or two, and was back up and running in a few minutes.  It was the best $40 I ever spent on software.  It also does the cleanest uninstalls because you can roll your hard drive back to a few minutes before you installed the offending software, and it's like it was never there, i.e. your registry is cleaner than a baby's bottom.  You can download a demo at www.roxio.com/goback.  Shop around, I think you can still get it for $39.95 somewhere.

>Tom, I think you might have missed my point. You said you reinstalled
>Windows but then had to reinstall some apps to re-establish their registry
>associations.
>This is precisely the point I was posting about, ie, is it possible to avoid
>this?
>What I'm asking is, has anyone tried, or know if it's possible, to do a
>clean install of Windows, then do a scanreg /restore of a recent and
>error-free cabfile, which would contain all of the appropriate settings.
>I'll put it another way:
>Windows is running extremely well and you've just saved your most recent
>cabfile from your sysbckup folder to a storage location.  Suddenly you have
>a very bad crash and are forced to reinstall Windows.  You deltree
>C:\Windows and do a completely fresh install, thus losing all of your
>settings, which neccessitates reinstalling a zillion apps.
>My question: Is it possible to restore that 'most recent cabfile'?  Would
>that not get Windows back to it's previous pre-crash condition?
>
>
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