It's turned out to be a better time investment to restore a KNOWN stable system in 15 minutes than to completely reload...but that's just my opinion. I only image the system "disk" when I'm satisfied with it's stability. In this instance, I believe I have a random hardware thing going on that brought WinXP down this time (system restore has been unreliable). A few other configuration points that makes this easy for me: - WinXP is on a partition all by itself, nothing else touches it. - I load ALL applications on a separate partition. - I keep ALL data on a separate partition. With this configuration, all I have to restore is the C: drive and I'm back in business. If there were any apps that I loaded since the last image, I would have had to reload those too...if they required the registry. Oh, I do data backups on CD-R...because it's easier than trying to extract a single file from a disk image.