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Dr. Klahn

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XP System Restore service will not start

I have here an XP system which is unable to start the System Restore service or the application.

When the application is started, a notification box pops up with:  "System Restore is not able to protect your computer.  Please restart your computer, and then run System Restore again."  This has been tried three times.

Attempting to start the System Restore service manually fails:  "Error 145:  The directory is not empty."  (I must admit that I have seen more useful error messages than this one.)

Event Viewer shows srservice having produced event 104, "The System Restore initialization process failed."

This is related to the system owner's having "cleaned up" the System Restore directory.

Suggestions will be gratefully received.
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Scott Silva
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You can do a manual system restore if that is your goal.  If I recall correctly (been a while since XP) you boot from a different disk (Bart's PE was my usual choice) and look in \windows\system32\config and you'll find a folder with old versions of the 5 (?) registry files.  Move the existing ones to a backup folder, copy those from the old version folder, and reboot.
This will take you 30 min plus+ but, do a windows repair.  Find the XP disk that matches their system (ie xp sp2).  Boot to the cd, select the os and hit the "r" key.  This will keep all their data but correct all the XP files back to their original state.  The downside is that you will be doing windows updates to get it back to where it was for a while once booted back into windows.  Googled it and this link lays it out pretty nice.  https://neosmart.net/wiki/restore-to-factory-settings/
you can also run sfc  :
http://www.updatexp.com/scannow-sfc.html                        SFC use in XP
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm            Repair install  XP

i added the repair guide if you need it as well
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Dr. Klahn

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Solution as found on this system:

System would not boot to the command console, although I am reasonably sure that is a different issue.

SFC found nothing wrong with the system.

Attempting to clean out the restore point directories per Scott's suggestion put me on the right track.  However, one file refused to delete no matter what - a .TTF file.  Eventually I renamed it to "temp.txt" and rebooted, at which point Windows no longer protected it and was able to delete it.  On the next reboot Windows did indeed create new contents in the restore point folder and the service was able to start.  The system had forgotten all previous disk settings related to restore points, however, and it was necessary reset them all to the proper values.

I believe the whole issue was caused by the fact that the one .TTF file was protected by Windows and could not be deleted as long as it had that extension.  (And not in safe mode, either.)