I am experimenting and will try that.
Based on several hours of reading about that error message, it appears that the anti-virus is interfering, defragging is interfering or something similar.
I found a entire site about system restore from a MVP and it seems to back up what i am saying.
System Restore in Windows Vista:
It says the vista restore works entierly different than the xp restore.
I'll keep trying to solve this problem, I just want an one-click way to rollback any new changes rather than to load an entire set of dvd backups.
Another dumb question...if I create a registry backup in CCleaner, it says to restore it just right click it and sleect merge. Would that work as a simple restore program?