Several times now, I have had to fix a corrupt registry manually (by copying from RegBack). The root cause of the problem is my laptop's battery: it's a bit old, and doesn't give me enough warning, so that sometimes the power goes out during shutdown. But this raises a thorny issue. Surely Windows should be immune to this problem? Wouldn't a journaling registry prevent this kind of thing from happening? The registry is by far the weakest link in the reliability chain. At the very least, Startup Repair ought to be able to detect and fix this issue.