Vista - System Restore VSS problems.

I have a restore point created each night as a scheduled task and they all finish successfully but don't always show up as a choice in system restore. (I start the system restore process just to see my restore points, is there a better way!?) and sometimes the one created won't show up, or all of sudden one day is missing and it's not the oldest date, but the second or third newest.
Today i noticed that my task ran successfully but something triggered it to start again 9 minutes later then failed. I am absolutely sure there is only the one trigger for 1:30:00am so it's bizarre it tried to run again 9 minutes after it completed successfully. Then i checked my restore points and there were only TWO left out of 12. And the one for the 19th was not one of them. just the 18th and 17th restore points for 1:30:00am. Even though the 19th task did finished just fine before it kicked off again and failed. 12 is as high as it goes as for number of restore points on my machine, but my disc usage shown with VSSADMIN list shadowstorage just keeps growing. It is at 15GB right now but I only have those 2 restore points.
And files I change, then save and right click to choose restore previous versions, and i do not get any shadow copy versions to restore, even though there is still a restore point from 1/18 and one from 1/17. I tested this before when i had more restore points and the "restore previous versions" has never shown any shadow copies.
Does anyone have any insight into this and can you name all services that need to be running for both shadow copy and the ability to restore from shadow copy?
I turn off all services I know i don't need and am quite experienced and work as a programming manager in IT. I'm not a hardware and OS guru but I know enough what services can be turned off. the only one i question and I tested turning it back on to no avail is the System Service. At home i'm not on a network and don't need that functionality. I've never had any problems with my XP box or the Vista box up till now with Services service disabled.

thanks,
jerry