Hi and welcome to the forums labelmicro.

When you are speaking about GOTD software, the answer is NO, there is no legal way to reinstall.
Please read the FAQ.
You'll find already a lot of discussions to this topic here in the forums.
Other programme developers have their own rules, I'm sure you got them with your registration info when you purchased the programmes.
graylox

I find it necessary to rebuild my system about every 6 - 8 months to clean out the 'garbage' left by old programs or programs incorrectly installed. Is there any way of backing up the Activation status of various programs. Would copying all the files of a program directory be sufficient or perhaps some key or branch in the registry?
Any ideas?

http://techtalk.pcpitstop.com/2010/05/03/no-more-restore-points-for-windows7/?

It's being reported by Lockergnome that in Windows7, System Restore is somehow losing all restore points during shutdown.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/668-system-recovery-options.html

Software yes Software Like the cleaner spyware scanner make new kill old spybot S & D will do this just tell it no & you be OK.

i have had a similar problem and the solution for me was to go to control panel-- system-- restore tag--and then turn off the monitoring of my extra hard drives so restore was only monitoring my main c drive then system restore works and go back and turn on monitoring for the extra drives

hope this helps

Check out Erunt. It's a little utility that will make a complete backup of your registry, every day at system start up and keeps a defined number of backups. If ever issues occur, it will let you go back to an earlier date. It's real easy to use.
Pura vida
AlexSJ

Increasing the space in %-values in the monitored drives 'settings' tab might solve the problem.
But ,some software installations may interfere with the files system restore relies upon also.

It seems like every time system restore doesn't respond or hangs ,its SRP's are deleted.

Quote:
You run out of disk space on the system drive or on any one of the available non-system drives, and System Restore stops responding and stops monitoring your system.

This behavior causes the system to delete all restore points in an attempt to free up disk space. However, you have probably already received a warning about running low in disk space prior to this point. In this case, when sufficient disk space is freed, System Restore starts to monitor the system again. At this point, it creates an automatic System Checkpoint.

Note If you have a multiple-partition computer with a drive that has almost no free space, this drive may cause System Restore to stop responding all across the system and to delete restore points. However, this only occurs if you have reached the minimum disk space that is allowed and if you perform operations on monitored file types. Examples of such operations are upgrading, uninstalling or installing programs, moving, and deleting or renaming files. If your drive has almost no free space but you only perform operations on non-monitored files, System Restore does not stop responding
Unquote

BTW SRP's are set to be deleted after 90 days.

avast all by itself can be a pain in the performance department. copying digital pictures around the LAN turning it off is quite a difference.

I too strongly recommend revo.

The system slow-up was most likely caused by Avast, Comodo, and A-Squared. Mixing and matching third party programs increases exponentially probabilities of running into compatibility issues. You have to keep in mind the programs you’re using all have competing products. For example the developers of A-Squared were not thinking about whether their program will run harmoniously with Avast and vise versa. Developers don’t do a bunch of software tests running their program in combinations against competing programs. All they care about was whether their product will run in harmony with the operating system (i.e., XP, Vista, etc). I run the same security programs you do except for Comodo. What I do might be something you could try. Turning off some of the Avast providers and just run the standard shield and the web shield. Once a week I do an update and system scan with A-Square (incidentally I temporality pause Avast before doing an A-Square deep scan). Next get rid of Comodo. It’s a good program in all but unless you’re involved in some sort of high profile top secret stuff it’s overkill; besides even if you’re involved in some secret stuff I somehow don’t think you’d be mucking around with freeware. The Windows firewall is fine.

Now where to start looking for an answer regarding the restore issues - The Registry. Any fooling around with Windows Registry does involve some risk, and cleaning it out can have an impact on your PC's overall performance. It sounds like when you ran the registry cleaner some essential files Windows needed for a restore were deleted, or should I say, “cleaned”. Now can it be fixed? The answer to that is a big fat perhaps. First I would try using your Registry cleaner's restore feature which ensures that only the changes the program just made are reversed (keep in mind at this point restoring might not be possible if some DLL entry was deleted from the previous cleaning). Everything depends on the condition of your Registry.

For future reference whatever you do, never choose an autoclean option, they are not to be trusted. In most other programs that walk you through with wizards, it's no big deal if you don't pay attention and you merely keep clicking the Next button. That is not the case with Registry cleaners. I strongly encourage you to stay alert and read whatever the cleaning tool has to say. When you begin scanning, make sure not to have any applications running; if possible, it's also smart to unload any tools running in your system tray. That's because open apps are constantly making Registry changes, and you want the Registry cleaner to do its work with no interference.

The Windows Registry is the essential system that houses the massive collection of details about your computer; where programs are stored, which helper programs (known as DLLs) are shared among your various applications, listings of all your Start-menu shortcuts, pointers to the programs that fire up when you click on an icon, and that's just the beginning. Practically everything you do in Windows is recorded somewhere in the Registry. For instance, the URL for this forum probably has an entry now. The paths to the last dozen or so images or documents you opened are there, too, as are the details of the programs you most recently installed or uninstalled.

As a last resort, restore your PC with a backup program--which you certainly have, right?

I hope this has been of some help because I can certainly relate to the anxiety cause by PC issues and I’m not afraid to say, “Been There & Done That.”

(I almost forgot, when you’re through reading this, get your self a copy of Revo Uninstaller)

http://www.revouninstaller.com/

ran C/cleaner and also let it clean the registry

have you considered this may have done it?

take a look at Debunking Common Windows Performance Tweaking Myths.

Hi rizla,
Here is a link that might help:
http://bertk.mvps.org/html/srfail.html
Good luck,
Barry

I have just re-installed my Windows XP2 and set a new restore point every day over a period of a week during which time i was installing various bits of (Bought) software.

Also have avast (free) Comodo(free) and Asquared (free) running all of the time.

sys started to slow up and freeze a bit and ran C/cleaner and also let it clean the registry, but still no good. triad a few other things like turning off background progs and eventually went to do a sys restore and ALL of the restore points had disappeared.

Where do I start looking for an answer?

Anyone?

Earlier this month, Akshay posted a link to DriveImage XML, a freeware alternative to Norton Ghost. I'm reposting here, thinking it can help some of the Giveaway readers needing a good backup/restore utility.

Direct Link: http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm

http://gandhiakshay.blogspot.com/2007/10/driveimage-xml-norton-ghost-alternative.html

Try someone else with the games, not sure about them so don't want to give bad advice.

Well browse to them and save them.

Then export them back.

I just did a soft restore, which reinstalled original MS software ... and disabled software I had purchased or downloaded.

I did try to back up my screen shots of the registration keys, but the WinRar file was corrupted in the soft-restore process. I did successfully export the registry before the crash (apparently caused by Advanced Windows Care .. which worked beautifully the first couple days) so I'm wondering if I could replace the registration keys for the past week's programs by culling them from that exported registry? The programs I really miss are Aston, Flash Spring, and ConceptDraw's Mind Map. The games would be nice, but those programs were genuine blessings.

Can anyone help?