>Haven't you ever manually created a restore point in Windows XP using Windows Help, System Restore?

No, I didn't. I once probably tried to read about some system backup and restore, don't know how many versions of Windows before (having been in charge of such things on a PDP then on VAX once upon a time), and saw that Microsoft has different names for things I've always known. Actually found it quite hard to follow - probably knew too many words with meanings differnt from their usage, got generally too annoyed and decided M$ must have written that for 1) those who must use it or 2) those who think they must. So I never really even read through what it does, not to mention trying to use it :).

So when I switched to XP few weeks ago (and had I known my motherboard was at fault, I'd have stayed with W2K), I really didn't have the time to read what's new, take a tour or whatever - I needed a machine up and running asap to do some work. System backup - probably there may be some good news there, but I don't have the time.

Besides, I don't see a point in saving the registry - there already is a backup of it, but if anything goes wrong, you're likely to reboot at least six times before registry becomes suspect, and by that time the last good backup was overwritten four times. And by the time registry has gone bad, there's probably too much garbage in it anyway, time to reinstall :).