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Living in fear of rebooting my PC 
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I understand why.
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Seriously, I am a big fan of Ghost for backup purposes, as long as I remember to take the image. It's absolute, you see. I never really considered System Restore before, I just thought it was one of thoses "useless, annoying Windows ME things". Sounds incredibly arrogant I know, but it sounds like you have done your homework. How much disk space does it take up? >>
Actually that's really the problem with Ghost -- it is absolute. When I first started using NT4 and Win2K (I first started using Windows just before Win2K went RTM.) I used to make jokes about system state and full system backups, saying that doing this to be able to restore the system in case of a catastrophic event was silly because we were likely backing up the very problem that was going to lead to another catastrophic failure. That was actually true in NT4, which was devoid of any kind of system file protection.
With Ghost (or any number of different kinds of backup utilities) you make a backup of your system partition at any point where you think everything is working okay. But that backup you make may already include a fatal flaw that just hasn't got around to biting you -- yet. The system is working fine for you at that moment, so you suppose that the system state and file complement are fine, too. But maybe it's all running okay at the moment simply because you haven't yet had the particular combination of processes running that's going to come up at some point and trash the system. Okay, so a couple of weeks after you Ghosted your last "good" setup your system goes down. You restore your "good" image, and it sits there waiting to bite you again, just like it did before. The only kind of machine I would use this type of backup strategy on is one which has run perfectly under heavy and varied use for a couple of months with NO changes to its configuration. At that point, I would judge that I had a solid image and back that sucker up. I'd then place that image on a test box of the exact same specs, and before I applied any change at all to that primary production box, I'd test the change on the test box. But this is the sort of thing I'd do only for a seriously depended-upon production box. Not for a personal machine. On a personal machine, I just do a fresh install and re-install all the apps. The only thing I back up on a personal machine is my data and the downloaded software complement.
I think that Ghosting on a personal machine that gets three or four new apps or utilities and several software / OS upgrades per week is not such a good deal. Getting a perfect working Ghosted image that won't include problems from a previous configuration is largely a matter of luck.
On the other hand, System Restore applies "filters" from the repair capabilities of the OS to the restoration process, and those filters can actually repair problems in the saved registry hives. That's something that no ordinary backup process can do. The driver rollback feature alone is wonderful. Anyone who has ever tried to clear a system of a problematic driver file complement will realize at once just how useful driver rollback is. The "bad stuff" is gone after you do the rollback. So those hard-coded interactions between driver files that were never supposed to share the same directory can't occur any more. I tested this little gimmick with some nasty variations of the ATI Mobility P drivers for a Dell Inspiron 7500. Reverting from a bad driver under Windows 2000 was a nightmare because you had to find out from the actual writer of the drivers just exactly what files you were looking for and manually remove them. Otherwise, the installation of a driver set which would have worked perfectly would not work at all because there was some nasty little .sys or .dll file down there in the drivers directory that was putting the kibosh on proper operations.
And, no, I don't think it's arrogant of you to think you can do it better yourself. No one who's seen DOS-based Windows could be blamed for thinking that. But System Restore really works as advertised in any situation I've been able to devise to confound it. As far as I can tell, the only way of defeating it is to a) turn it off, or b) farkle the file system / partition table -- a fairly unlikely thing to happen with NTFS.
System Restore takes, by default, it's maximum of 12% of the boot partition on all of the installations I've seen. The user is at liberty to reduce that using a slider control in the settings applet. The metadata used by System Restore is in the System Volume Information directory off of the root, and it also makes use of the protected files caches on the system. WinXP lets you see this directory, but you may not touch it. Well, not unless you do something like I did. If you dual boot WinXP with itself, you can look at the System Volume Information directory when booted from a different partition than the one whose System Volume Information directory you are inspecting. I would recommend highly against doing anything to it manually.
So far none of my machines is actually using anywhere near the 12% limit, and I've done a lot of testing of various types of software on two of these machines. I'm a big believer in having a huge boot partition. None of my boot partitions has more than 30% of its total space utilized. Hey, hard drive space is cheap, and time is money. All sorts of things work better and faster on an uncrowded system / boot partition.
I don't know what to suggest in your case. Obviously you're walking a bit of a tightrope. I have NEVER tried reinstituting the use of System Restore on a PC on which it had not been running. I don't quite know how well it can work in such a case. I would not hesitate to tell you to make use of it on a fresh installation of the OS, but I just don't know for certain what I'd do if I were in your shoes. I think I'd wait until I had performed a full clean installation of the OS. If you turned off System Restore early on in the game, then you don't have any (or many) restore points to choose from, and they're all well back in the past history of this istallation. You have to redo all software installations and system configurations that occurred since the last restore point, so you might very well have as much work to do as you would with a full, clean installation of WinXP.
I'm kind of fastidious. That's probably what I'd do if I were you. BUT I would FIRST try to find out (if I could) just what had farkled my system so that I didn't wind up doing it again. I'd at least experiment some (like with removing DiscJuggler and maybe other apps / devices) to try to satisfy my curiosity. But remember that, especially if you've also turned off Windows File Protection, your problem could be due to more than just one item. It could be due to a combination of changes in registry settings and / or file complement rather than just one errant item.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you, but not sure I know what other help I might be just now.
- Collin
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