Thank you for your help. I am not quite sure what happened. When I logged onto my laptop to follow your instructions it was very slow to start, then it went into a self repair... it had not done this before, even when I had choosen this option I was still getting the same error. After some considerable time it loaded windows in normal mode, restoring back a few weeks. I do not understand how as the last available restore point had been more recent than this when I had tried to do this "manually" myself.,, anyway... I have been able to run in normal mode without problems for the last couple of days. Thanks again for your help, I am glad I didn't have to reinstall window 7.