Microsoft just saved my bacon, yet again.  Here I am, in the middle of co-presenting MSDN Events on ASP.NET 2.0 with Jacob Cynamon -- our local Developer Community Champion -- and my laptop gave me a bluescreen on startup.  Now, I've seen this before, but honestly not much at all with XP.  On the rare occasion that I have, a reboot has cleared everything up.

This time, a reboot didn't help.  Several reboots didn't help.  Cursing, begging, and prayer didn't help.  What did help, thankfully, was Microsoft Knowledgebase article #307545.  Basically, this article showed me how to get into Windows XP, find one of the many restoration points that XP has kindly been making for me (since I would, admittedly, never have done this on my own), use it to blow away my corrupt registry, and get everything back to exactly where it was just this past Wednesday.  I didn't lose any data and I haven't installed anything for a couple of weeks now, so I'm as good-as-new.

I'm very impressed that XP has been keeping these restoration points for me.  I'm a little puzzled as to why I got a BSOD out of nowhere, though -- no new software, no new hardware, etc., etc..  I'm thinking that I might've gotten a virus, but that seems unlikely, given my security settings and that I am running Norton Anti-Virus.  My version of Norton is a bit old, though so -- per Magenic IT's recommendation earlier this year -- I am now upgrading to the most recent version.

Learn from my mistakes -- someone should!