Its best to not restart a bunch of times when that sort of thing happens... I don't remember the exact details on how to do this but its on the MS site... Win98 (and other newer versions) default saves 5 copies of your registry and if this happens you can boot to safe (or DOS... not sure which you use) and replace the registry with an older version from a day or so back and reboot normally.
Sorry I can't pull up how that is done right off, its been a couple of years since we had to do it. But each time you do that restart, it rotates the saved registry files and sounds like yours is already rotated out by now. You CAN reset the saves to a seperate directory and also save more than the default 5 sets of files tho.
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If it can break on Windows, *I* have broken it!
