Like an idiot, I ran Windows Universal tweaker without knowing what it would "tweak". It was part of the ATI optimized Driver package from Tech Connect. The tweaker is also offered on this board. The driver works fine. The tweaker seems to have delved into my registry and removed the ability to use a pagefile. I have enough RAM ( 1 GB) that Win XP SP2 will run, but I need a pagefile for some apps (recording).

Attempting to reset the pagefile in the usual way won't work, rebooting just keeps bringing up the same error message, and the pagefile settings page keeps the setting I entered, they just don't exist.

Tried System Restore...no luck. Tried to go back farther in Sys Restore, and now it just won't restore.

Tried resetting permissions in Safe Mode, but they are set correctly.

Tried rerunning the Tweak program to return to windows defaults...no luck.

Am scanning for viruses, trojan's etc, but don't expect that is the problem.

Any ideas ???

Try looking at your Computer Manager and Group Policy Editor to see if something is weird there.

In Group Policy Editor, you will find that most values are set to 'not configured'. This is fine, look out for values that are either set to 'enabled' or 'disabled'.

You can start Computer Manager with compmgmt.msc and Group Policy Editor with gpedit.msc (Start, Run of course).

the tweaker has "reset default setting" feature.. use it
then go to advanced system options.. and disable pagefile on all drives and reboot.
now delete pagefile.sys from every drive, run chkdsk
then recreate it

Well, I did try the return to default and, as noted, it had no effect. There were no pagefiles on any of my drives. I confirmed this by analyzing each drive with Diskeeper. Each time I tried to make any changes to the pagefile, after rebooting they would appear on the pagefile adjustment screen of Advanced System...but they would not exist on the drive. To top it all off, I began to get another error on shutdown: DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE.

I wonder what it was that was "tweaked" with this program, besides my nose!!

I have finally given up and reinstalled Windows XP (great way to spend a Sunday afternoon) and the computer is up and running, and I am a little wiser.

Thanks for your suggestions.

a normal thingy ....
often you can destroy something (and make a backup before) so you are able to easily restore anything within 10 minutes

but sometimes something goes wrong when you do not expect it ...

e.g.
I never had any problem when deleting the content of the prefetch folder ... now when I do this windows boots very very fast and when loading desktop ... ERROR ... no chance to get back into windows
the best thing is to get Acronis true inmage and set a sheduled backup every 2 days
(itdoes take about 4minutes, so it ain't a problem even when using the PC)