Unable to restore in Win XP

[Jim]

Last night I was having trouble after uninstalling some software so I
attempted to restore to several restore points before the uninstall.
In all cases after the reboot when the window would normally come up
and say the restore was complete, it instead aid restore was not
possible and no changed had been made. Restore was active, there were
restore points, but it could not roll back to them.

This happened before, when I tried to roll back to a time when my
hibernate feature still worked.

What's going wrong when restore is on and saving restore points but
can't use them to roll bck the system?

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

If you turn restore off, and restart, you lose all old restore points, but
it will probably work in the future.
See the System app in control panel.

 

[Jim]

If you turn restore off, and restart, you lose all old restore points, but
it will probably work in the future.
See the System app in control panel.

I guess the operative word here is "probably" since this problem
has occurred 2x (with all recovery points unusable), although in
between I did a successful restore 1x, right after turning it off/on
and setting a restore point. I was just wondering if there's any way
I can avoid the restore files being corrupted.