My system restore has no calandar and no restore points.There is a box that says Saturday, Dec. 30, 1899. When I click next it tells me to pick another day and restore point and try again. I tried clicking the arrow that points to the right of my screen in the box that has the 1899 date in it which says next day but nothing happens. Today I did set a restore point before I tweaked quite a number of things but I don't see that restore point either. Anyone have any Idea what is wrong? Thanks

MS Article: 275646 - System Restore Shows Date of Saturday, December 30, 1899

MS Article: 306768 - Troubleshooting System Restore in Windows Millennium Edition

But do yourself a favour and turn off system restore in ME - It doesn't work. Turn it off forever and save yourself any future annoyance before you come to rely on it.

MS Article: 264887 - How to Enable and Disable System Restore

**Edited from the post that was deleted.

ME is an old operating system and as such all it's problems are well documented. Some of us here have run the operating system from day one and either had the problems personally, or seen the issues through this and other forums, and, or, seen the problems through running small computer tech businesses in daily life.

You are right to not do something you aren't sure of, or confident in doing, as that usually leads to errors.

But, having said that, everyone has to start somewhere and a few of us here started on this (and other) computing.net forums.

1) So keep system restore running for the time being till you're convinced it's more hassle than it's worth. In which case you are going to have to fix it.

2) Missing or corrupt .htc files are nothing new and can cause numerous other errors, just means the file wasn't created or it's corrupt. More information on what they are, what they do, can be found at the MSDN library:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/li...

3) Regarding editing the registry to fix the problem, if you look near the bottom of MS Article 275646 it gives you an easy way round to do things...

Look at the grey box with text in it, starting with the word REGEDIT4 and copy all the text in the box, starting with the word REGEDIT4 and ending in x-component"

Open Notepad (not Wordpad) and paste the text into it. Save it as SR_Merge.reg

.reg is the important bit, means it's saved as a registry file and Windows knows what to do with it. SR_Merge just means "system restore merge" you can name it anything you like.

The important thing here is to back up the registry. Easy enough. Go to Start >> Run >> and type scanreg or scanregw and click OK.

When you receive a prompt to back up the registry, click Yes. And when you receive the "Backup complete" message, click OK.

Now double click on the SR_Merge.reg file you created and follow the prompts through accepting the changes it's going to make.

Reboot the machine and the Saturday, Dec. 30, 1899 error message box should be gone.

...and if it doesn't work, or something bad happens, you have a good registry configuration you've saved to go back to.

I totally agree with Viking's response #2. Turn it off & NEVER turn it back on again!

I finally tried what Viking's instructions and it got rid of the 1899 date and now I have the calender showing with todays date in black(bold). So I guess this is the first restore point if I ever need it. I also found out how easy it is to backup the registry. I would like to know why Viking says in response 2 that the System Restore doesn't work. If so What should be used in its place. Is the registry backup enough?

It doesn't work because 9x/ME wasn't robust enough to handle such a complex operation as a system restore. System restore in ME was a practice run for what later appeared in XP. It should never have even been implemented. It's generally buggy in it's operation, interferes with other Windows processes and invariably causes crashes and general instability.

Alternative dedicated system restore / backup software to do the job is available, Acronis True Image and Norton Ghost being the two most popular packages.

ME already backs up your registry every time you boot the machine, so you are covered there.

The thing you need to do on a regular basis is back up your important data either by burning to disk, or transferring your data to an external drive.

..or partitioning the hard drive in two and keeping your operating system and programs on one partition and your data on the other. And even then I'd back up regularly if the data was important.

Viking I did as you suggested to the other member, But when I went to click on it and send it to my system it said I can not copy it because it is not a script file, please can you walk me thru this? My restore says the same as December 1899. something like that.

You guys are brilliant!!!!

Thanks dover

Dover Johnson