I truly love
Norton's Ghost 2003!
My laptop was behaving strangely this evening - applications
were spontaneously hanging, system was freezing when logging out, etc. A
closer look at my Windows XP event log told me that STISVC.EXE (still
imaging service) was failing to start, and a whole load of errors were
reported about the COM+ subsystem. Uh-oh!
So, I reinstalled COM+ (as per my
instructions),
which fixed the COM+ errors, but did nothing for the random system
hangs. So, after backing up the user profiles on my machine, I
pulled up Ghost, found my last good image from June and restored my
machine. A quick break of 15 minutes, while Ghost does it's magic,
after which my machine was stable again. All I needed to do then
was run windows update, update my anti virus application, and restore
the user profiles, presto - a working machine.
The moral of this story boys and girls - always have a recent backup
of your data files, and and a working operating system image stashed
away somewhere.