My dilemma: I own an HP dv41220us laptop. I was setting it up and realized that sfc /scannow was reporting unrepairable errors in regards to settings.ini of Windows Sidebar. I assumed it was because I used a sidebar theming utility, so I did a factory fresh restore using HP's Recovery Manager. Upon restart, and running sfc /scannow, the problem persisted: could not repair settings.ini. Apparently this is because of the way HP setup their Vista install with autounattend.xml -- it seems like thanks to their auto-add of such wonderful sidebar gadgets like WildTangent Reversi and Weatherbug through the autoattend.xml, sfc /scannow seems like it will report false errors indefinitely. (see here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947595) I cannot seem to repair it and have tried everything, even taking ownership of these protected folders. I thought that I would do a CLEAN INSTALL on partition C: without even TOUCHING my recovery partition using an OEM Vista disc I have laying around, but am glad I did my research because it would apparently screw up the MBR and bork my F11 restore functionality. In short, I'd rather live with the SFC errors than have no F11 restore ability on system boot. I don't want to download 3rd-party MBR hacks, so I suppose I'm stuck, yes? 1-This seems like it might be my only hope -- can you provide a link? 2-Do you think this would even work to restore the functionality if I do a clean install of Vista, thus wiping the MBR tables? 3-It seems like 'system repair' of Vista also mess up the MBR, even if it could possibly fix the settings.ini issue: to quote Snack a few pages back: "Warning: For lucky owners of HP PC's If you are not in face with booting problem - use F11 or F8 option to repair your instalation. Not even try to use above mentioned disc "Startup Repair" in that 100% legal utility from Microsoft to make some repair on HP computers because of those "advanced" HP software developers that don't take into account existence of any other soft (MS !!?) exept of theirs. You will lose the recovery F11 & F8 ability!!! wacko.gif " Let me know... This frustrates me to the point of looking at Macs ;( Thanks!!!