Get your favourite beverage and settle in for a little tale.

Sunday morning I'm up early (6.00am) with my 2 year old and decide to run a thorough scandisk on my system.

After about 2 and a half hours my wife is up and I decide to take a shower.

When I come up she is on the net and tells me that when she tries to check email she gets an error - something about invalid socket - blah blah.

She also tried opening an existing email and gets and error msin (I think) caused an error in msin - blah blah.

I try to reboot and the thing freezes.

After a few attempts to fix problem via scanreg /fix, restoring a previous registry I give up as we are going out.

Later I copy the windows directory to another drive and then restore windows from a ghost image made 2 days earlier.

I labouriously go through and copy across updated mail .dbx files and any documents etc that have been updated.

All is well - or so it seems.

Later that day I go to burn a CD and nada, it does all the prep like it's going to burn but then nothing.

So I uninstall Roxio ECDC 5 Platinum and reinstall it and it's updates.

During one of the updates an error pops up
Regedit has caused an error in <unknown>
Regedit will now close
I click ok and it continues and after the required reboots ECDC is working fine.

Last night I was doing my regular maintenance and went to fire up Regedit so I could manually clean out some of the MRUs
Regedit has caused an error in <unknown>
Regedit will now close
and when I clicked ok
This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator.
What the ????

Anyway I go and find Regedit.exe in C:\Windows and notice it's lost it's icon and is now the generic .exe icon.

Since it was already 2.00am I decided it was probably a good idea to leave it and not start mucking around with backups, extracting from the setup CD etc.

I go to bed.

6.30am and my 2 year old wakes up, but luckily wants to come in to our bed.

7.00am - now he wants to get up.

Whilst I'm getting him some breakfast, emptying the dishwasher etc, I suddenly remember the old lap top I have with WinMe installed.

I get it out and power up, copy Regedit.exe to a USB drive and then copy from that USB drive to my PC.

Try Run > Regedit and it works perfectly.

So.....it appears that Regedit.exe got corrupted or something which I guess is possible, but any hints as to why ?