I'm glad it was too late last night for me to start trying to recover, since apparently the system wanted to sleep off the problem. Tried booting it in Safe Mode, that worked fine now. So I rebooted to let it try a normal boot, and that too worked fine. Only change was I unplugged a USB data drive I had attached last night. That may have been causing it to hang (why I have no idea), or I did just enough boots for something in the RunOnce registry area to finally finish up something. Ahh, they joys of an OS with minimal logging, no easy way to tell what was occurring. The event log just has a big gap between the last clean shutdown, and the first boot into safe mode today.

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That is true for nearly all mainstream operating systems in use today.

It may be true, but other operating systems have much better resources available in the way of recovering from something like this. Linux, I boot to a install CD or Live CD and can get full access to the system, and make repairs. I can edit system configuration files with a text editor, not a registry editor. I can easily find a problematic library and restore it since there isn't 10,000 8.3 unfriendly file names hidden away in system32.

OS X, I'd boot to the install CD, and try to reinstall. Odds are it would work, allowing me to just boot up and have everything working again with no reinstall of applications. If that fails, I could do an Archive and Install, boot up, then move my Applications out of the archive folder to restore them. Two hours tops, most waiting for the OS to copy files off the DVD.

Where as Windows programs demand to throw crap in system32 that they can't live without, throw a bunch more crap in the registry, and so on. None of it easily repairable by hand, at least not in any time reasonable compared to just suffering through reloading everything. And using the repair option of Windows usually leaves the system in a similar state. These days from a failure like this, I would have booted to something that allowed me access to the drive, nuked the Windows and Program Files folders, then moved Document and Settings elsewhere. Do a reinstall, install drivers, then look through all my programs not installed into Program Files and reinstall each one.

Regarding BartPE, it might have worked to kick off System Recovery, but thats a test for another day. Back when I worked for Gateway, they had a product called GoBack they shipped on systems. That worked similar to System Recovery, but had so many more ways to recover. Boot up and hit space and it booted a utility instead of Windows. MBR or something else hosed? Boot off the GoBack CD, and have the same utility running to then revert the system, including the MBR back. After this incident, I'm probably going to see if they still exist and buy a copy, since System Recovery seems to be more for "oops, I deleted my recipes Word doc" instead of "oops, the OS broke by looking at it funny".