> what problems has the System Restore caused that you don't know about yet?

Hopefully none.

I keep a very small, very clean C: (E: actually). Pretty much nothing there but the Windows install itself. I only have System Restore monitoring E:. All other drives are excluded. (Virtually) all programs are installed elsewhere.

> System Restore is NOT a disk image ...

Known. I know all of its' limitations ...

> You could have found and deleted the policies using the registry editor

Sure if I'd have known where to look & what to delete.

> your problem was just registry related

My problem is that MS provides easy access to a "feature", that anyone exploring windows might be tempted to enable - to see what it does, but then leaves no apparent way to reverse the procedure. It's not like there even is an enable/disable switch. Once you've added it, it is on to some degree whether you then want it or not.