Well, folks. I finally did it.
Barely two weeks after installing Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit on my PC, I BROKE IT!!
Totally unusuable to the point I had to format and reinstall completely ^_^
I haven't a clue how, I wasn't trying. What was happening was I could open files in explorer, but if I wanted to copy, move, alter properties, anything else, it killed the explorer process completely. Reset windows (without rebooting, funnily enough) and kinda mini-reloaded the system to start again.
System restore is all but useless : The only options it gave me to restore to an earlier time were about 6 hours back....and I broke it two days ago.
So now I get the joy of putting everything back on, and decided to forgo the pleasure of not having my soundblaster card spit, crackle and hissle at me, I ripped it out and am now on ac-97 onboard sound :bluuuuuuuuurrch:
Go me ^_^
I also broke a tonka truck, back in the early 80s - when they came with life-time guarantees for being unbreakable. :D I still got it ^_^

Clever.

Yesterday, I broke my piggy bank.
And I had sushi for lunch.

With Windows becoming more and more complex nowadays it's too easy to break it. You can just type "regedit.exe" and break the living hell out of Windows with no problem. DOS on the other hand was a bitch to break; all you had to do was edit your autoexec.bat and config.sys files to be back in working order.

that is why it is important to create restore points regularly. once a week, once every two weeks...
to avoid silly things like that. i managed to break my xp once too and had to reinstall.

The number of restore points depends on how much space you have allocated to it. With enough space available the restore points will go back at least a few days and there will be automatic points made for most software and driver changes. If you have heaps of space to spare you might as well extend the System Restore slider to give that extra bit of insurance. If you are about to do something you definitely want to be able to undo (e.g. installing beta video card drivers) you can also manually create a System Restore point to make doubly sure that you can undo the change.
If you have a second drive or an external drive you can also schedule regular system backups; restoring from these is very easy, and the backed up files are also made available to the Previous Versions properties tab (which lets you directly access an older version of a file or folder without actually restoring over top of the current one).
Between System Restore and the enhanced repair functions introduced from Vista onwards it has become significantly more difficult to irreparably break Windows.

Yeah, I had to open a cmd prompt window to copy my documents over to my backup drive before wiping the boot drive. Took me 30 minutes to remember the commands format though...not used DOS properly since Win95, and I couldn't be bothered looking for which backup disc of ~150 had my Windows Commander on, to install that.
I know all about regedit, and can say the only thing I did with the registry was import two "scripts" that added a "copy to..." and "move to..." to the context menu : Which MAY have been the cause of the problem I experienced, but it had worked alright for 4 days or so before this FUBAR. Only other thing I'd done was tell W7 to use the install CD drivers for the soundblaster card instead of the crappy, bug-ridden auto-detected drivers it installed at the very start...but even that had worked at least a full day before this "break".
Read above for my comments on how useful System restore was....I'll give you a clue : Not very. It only went back to around midday yesterday (ie, this is now the very early morning of the day after), so maybe 6 hours worth....there was a check box to "show more restore points" that did ....absolutely nothing at all. Hence why I chose to throw it in teh bin, and re-install the OS completely from scratch.

It might just have been one of the cursed installs of windows. Every 10th time or so I format & install, the OS is almost unuseable after a few days and I have to format and reinstall again. Its bizarre but seems to be consistent

I think you are lying about how you broke it. Admit it, you took a barbaric dumb (Well, you do have a barbarian for an avatar...) and when you flushed it decided to cause more damage to the pipes than the nukes falling in Fallout 3 did to DC. =)
You'd think Microsoft has some conspiracy going on with their software at this point. I'd just downgrade to Vista or XP instead of reinstalling over and over again. Record for blue screens this week: 2.

Actually going to XP would make it worse, with the exception of 1 problem with vista, all of my cursed installs have been with my 3 different versions of XP
If you get BSODs on a semi-regular basis, I'd lay odds on a hardware fault. Get memtest86 and run that overnight to see how many errors you get

Well, XP is old...for an OS.

False.

Yeah, Windows 1 is old for a OS. About the only thing harder to obtain would be a copy of Windows 2...

You all can keep your Win7 to yourself, I hate all the bells, whistles & bullshite of new operating systems.
I liked Win98 SE, mainly because XP made all my games play slower and some not at all, and many other reasons that i'll hold back from ranting about.
MS needs to release a clean operating system... but thats never gonna happen because it contradicts the whole purpose of killing off the competition only to create something that lets them all come back in again.