"Never press OK button if you don't have a full back up". :)

>I had occasion today to want to use system restore on my XP-Home system.
>Started it up, selected radio button to 'restore from a previous point' and clicked Next.
>That page showed a left side titled select a date... and the right side listed valid restore points. The right side had NOTHING under the title and the left side was correspondingly sitting with an empty listbox to select from!#@#!@
>
>Dug around and procedures I found indicted that I was doing things right. Went to MSDN and searched on: system restore no calendar. This produced 500 entrieds. Tried: system restore empty calendar. Got 500 entries. Tried a few on each, but most applied to WinME.
>
>All things seemed set correctly to record things properly. Particularly, the "System Properties"-->General-->"Turn off system restore on all drives" was NOT checked.
>So I went and tried to manually create a restore point. Finished OK but no sign of the calendar or it later, even after a reboot.
>
>Went back to system properties, checked the "Turn OFF" box and got a warning. Knew I was intending to turn it right back on after "Apply" of this one, so told it I knew what I was doing. HD clanged for several seconds, then drived showed as NOT being monitored. Enabled checkbox to turn it back on. It came on and drives showed 'mnonitored' again.
>
>Started System Restore again and this time I had a calendar, with today highlighted. NO OTHER DAYS WERE HIGHLIGHTED. Turned out that turning the thing OFF KILLED ALL PRIOR restore points!!!
>
>Being somewhat POed at this turn of events, went back to MSDN.
>This time I searched on: "system restore" no calendar. This time it came up with a sensible 9 entries. One of them was titled "System restore tool displays a blank calendar in...".
>
>The damned calendar was NOT BLANK!!! - it was NOT THERE AT ALL!!! For want of the word "blank" when it didn't apply I lost all my old restore points.#!@!#@$!#@$!#@$!#@$
>
>So be warned... if you have NO calendar displaying in the system restore tool, use the bolded phrase above to find the problem and how to fix it. DO NOT, under any circumstances, check the "Turn off system restore..." unless you want to get rid of all of your restore points.