Please Help Me on Disk Cleanup & System Restore problem

[psyzmik]

This concerns Windows XP Pro's Disk Cleanup program and the auto
creation of System Restore points.

Disk Cleanup has an option to delete all but the most recent System
Restore point. This function has stopped working on my computer. The
restore points are not being deleted by this program anymore. This is
one of those problems that can go unnoticed for a period of time as in
my case. I just assumed it was working until I looked at the System
Volume Information directory and found a bunch of restore points that
were not deleted.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what could be the problem and how to
fix it?

The second problem (and possibly related to the above) is that System
Restore Points are not being created automatically anymore. Yes, I
checked the Services for System Restore and it indicates it is Started
and set to "Auto". Also the System Restore is turned on and
"Monitoring" the drives as show by System Properties.

I can manually create a System Restore Point using the System Restore
program so I'm assuming the basic files and program are OK and not
missing or corrupted. My feeling is that both problems involve
something in the registry either missing or corrupt. I tried
Dependency Walker on both programs cleanmgr.exe and rstrui.exe and it
shows no problems. I used RegMon to trace the registry activity while
the programs were running but I can't really tell if something missing
without knowing what the proper registry sequence should be.

I've Googled both problems and it's seems like another problem I get
that no one else has ever experienced or seen before. So any help
would be appreciated.

Psyzmik

 

[Leonard Grey]

The thing that scares me, as you discovered, is that you can have
trouble with System Restore and not realize it until you need to
restore. That's a fine time to discover it's not working.

Restore points can become corrupt from time to time, and when that
happens the only thing you can do is to erase them all and start from
scratch. (Turn off SR, restart your computer, manually create a restore
point.)

Try that and see if it solves your problem.