muppitz -

Start | Help, click on Index, put "Group Policy" in the search box, and you actually will find some information about what may be happening to you.

There are too many things that could have been done there to make guessing worthwhile; but with the bit of information that you should find there you should be able to at least find the right places to look for something that's related to what's going on with your machine.

You may also be able to turn on System Restore if you just log on as "Administrator" rather than as a "user," assuming that you've set up your Administrator account.

There shouldn't be a need for any such policy unless you have multiple users defined. Sometimes when you create a new account, if you haven't done the Admin setup first, a "policy" will be created to use certain existing setup items, and only the "Administrator" can change most of those things.

As an interim thing, you can make a manual backup of your registry. The full "preferred procedures" are given in How to back up, edit, and restore the registry in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 (KB article 322756) and a couple of other Knowledge Base articles you'll find linked in that one.

John