Zoltan,

I tried to pursue that problem for a while a couple of client releases ago,
and got nowhere with level1.   Didn't have time to pursue it to level 2,
because it wasn't really doing us any harm.

We do successful bare-metal restores (about 2 a month) and find everything
is OK, even when we do get this message.

I played around restoring one key at the time, and found the problem was not
in the 4 major hives, so the machine still boots OK.  I suspect (but can't
prove) that this error occurs while it is trying to reload one of the
profiles - maybe it can't load the "current user" profile key because it
doesn't match the id currently logged on, or the S-ID key of the newly
created "adminstrator" doesn't match the old one, or something like that.
But that's just a suspicion.

Anyway, we go ahead an reboot, and the system is OK.

Of course, it's a crapshoot, because you would get the same un-helpful error
if it was one of the critical hives that failed to reload, like the HARDWARE
hive.

If you can get past level 1, it's a problem that really does need to be
fixed.

Wanda