Restoring Functionality with the Last Known Good Configuration

It's happened to me, and I'm sure it's happened to you, as well. You pop in a CD to install a driver for a snazzy new piece of hardware and blam, the system comes to a grinding halt and the bugcheck screen appears. After a few minutes, the system restarts and you watch as blam, the system crashes again.

It doesn't take a diagnostic genius to figure out that the driver you just installed made some change in the deep recesses of the machine that is giving Mr. Computer indigestion. The problem now becomes restoring the system back to functionality.

The obvious first step is to keep the bad driver from loading. Drivers are loaded by Registry entries in a top-level key in the System hive ...

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