Vista System Restore Error

In the last 6 months I've encountered several times a situation with Vista System Restore which at first I refused to deal with, as restoring an image of my system has become a panacea for all sorts of glitches.

I don't rely on SR at all for problems, and the reason that lead me to investigate the matter was related to Windows Update: on several occasions, important Windows updates couldn't install, reporting errors (those typical errors followed by a number). It was then that I realized that there was an odd relationship with Vista SR: the updates would fail if SR wasn't working properly.

Something was breaking SR, and as I couldn't interpret the errors ensuing its malfunctioning, I would restore a known image with SR working properly. With SR working again Windows important updates would install perfectly. All was well except that usually after a month SR would break again, creating the problem anew. In my last attempt to find the culprit by trial and error, I'm looking at 2 possible candidates: Disktrix Ultimate Defrag 2008 which I have uninstalled and Macecraft jv16 PowerTools 2009 (I have disactivated any interaction with the OS).

So far (more than a month) SR is still working properly. If anybody experienced something similar and has some specific answers, it would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

I can see that nobody seems to have experienced my problem. As a matter of fact my System Restore got corrupted again therefore I can definitely take Ultimate Defrag 2008 and jv16 PowerTools off the list of possible causes.

This time rather than blindly restoring a known image, I've decided to investigate the problem thoroughly and searching the Internet for the errors received, I found out that many people with Vista (and possibly Windows 7) are affected, either trying to backup their system with Vista or using Vista own defragmenter or, like in my case having troubles with System Restore and Windows Updates.

The good news is that MS Support has a fix:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939615

It is real quick, a reboot and everything is fine again. The bad news is that they don't say why it is happening.