Bill D

The system restore points, if you're using Vista or later and if your drive is formatted NTSF, are in a separate hidden partition. The partition is removed from available space, regardless of how much is in it; but it appears that OS can automatically inrease/reduce the partition size as needed, unless it reaches the maximum you have set.

If you told it to impose a limit lower than required by the files already in the partition, it's doubtful that the limit would be reset until sufficient files were removed to allow the remaining ones to fit in the new partition size. Turning off System Restore (or System Protection as it's called in latest versions) should have deleted all the files, so the resizing of the partition to the new limit could be done. A limit of 10% only means that the partition will use 10% or less of the drive.

Since the reduction in space used appears to be close to the space used by restore points previously (note that I didn't look closely at your numbers) it's possible that the new limit you set won't allow the ghost partition enough space to make a useful image, but the reduction would be from deleting files, and the change in allowed space would have no effect (for now). You might want to take a look to see if you get a new Restore Point after the system has had time to do the reconstruction after you turned the Restore function back on. Creation of a new restore point will run in background, and may take a while.

John