I have to ask you this after reading this response...
youngharry said:
I don't want to have to access 'Safe Mode' every time I want to do a 'System Restore' & really we shouldn't have to.
If you're using System Restore that much, I think it's time we ask ourselves "Why" am I having to restore so many times...and work on that area a bit more.
With that said, System Restore can be a very touchy operation and many things can cause it not to run properly when booted into normal windows, so Safe Mode is often needed in these cases, just like Sydney mentioned when a 3rd party driver can cause it's failure in normal mode, but so can many other things cause this failure.
Secondly, it still can be a bit buggy. We thoroughly tested SysRestore on my other Tech site and wrote a number of papers on it under XP (XP, SP1, SP2). We found that it failed in over 43% of the time and in 11% it caused the system to need reinstallation afterwards...not good numbers IMHO.
I have tried SysRestore in Vista myself and it failed 4 times and worked once. This was during Beta testing Comodo Firewall.
One thing you can check is the CBS Logs, Windows\Logs\CBS.log or CBS.persist.log for more info on the failures. You have to know exactly the time you tried the restore and make sure you check the log's last "modified" date to get the right one. They are Large and may not open in Notepad, or will look like it's frozen but it just takes some time to load.
They are big and you'll need to get the date/time right, or check immediately after you have a failed restore and then go to the bottom and work up till you get to the start of the restore, and then look for Failure messages. These logs log all system processes and may be daunting but be persistent because good info is in there on these failures.
But again, I just have to say that if you're depending on System Restore to the point that it seems you guys are, then there is actually a different problem we should be looking at, and that's your habits on a computer that causes the corruptions needing a restore. Or, is it simply a case of you using restore to fix little things that it shouldn't be used for? This is another common mistake by newer users they simply don't know any better or how to research and fix little things and end up using SysRestore more than it should be.
One more thing...NEVER restore to a point older than 1 week old. Too many other system changes have taken place in that time and that also makes SysRestore buggy and prone to failure, sometimes catastrophically so (see 11% above)...
Ted
