Why Vista's System Restore is Dangerous and What to do About it
Recently a colleague of mine had a problem: by mistake he had deleted part of the software registry hive (HKLM\Software) of his Vista machine while trying out some code. When he asked me for help my first thought was to go back to the last System Restore point. But that seemed a bit harsh. It would have restored the registry settings in question. But not only that: System Restore not only captures and restores every single file in the windows directory, it also does that same for a lengthy list of file types on all volumes for which System Restore is enabled.
Windows Internals