Vista - Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) - System Restore won't start

Hello everyone.

I'll try to be short and to the point.

Today on the 16th-Dec I've found out that my "Control Panel" is having
problems and icons won't appear at all.

I decided to do a system restore and that is where my problem lies.

Two days ago, on the 14th-Dec, I've tampered with my registry by using a
"registry cleaner". It seems that other than my Control Panel another couple
of programs were not working because of this.

Luckily the registry-cleaner program kept backups of the registry entries
replaced so I reinserted them. The programs worked correctly after that but
the "Control Panel" is still having the issue of disappearing icons.

What's worse is that before, or after the re-insertion of the backed-up
registry files "system restore" would not work.

I have checked with the "Event viewer" and it produces two or three errors
which do not have an ID in Technet so I cannot find more about them. One of
them (luckily the one appearing more often) does.

http://technet2.microsoft.com/window....mspx?mfr=true

From "Services" the VSS service fails to start and whenever I try to start
it or use the "vssadmin" command from the command prompt I received the
following error:

"Error: Unexpected failure: The system cannot find the file specified."

Any help will be greately appreciated.

-Nick

Hi.
I have just solved my problem with system restore. I found That the "Volume
Shadow Contol" Services was on Auto which was good but there is another
Service called "Microsoft Shadow copy Provider" which had been disabled. I
put this on Auto and started it and was able to start using System Restore.
Hope this helps
Dave