Yesterday I had an issue with a failed system restore which caused my machine to not reboot correctly. I think I may have been the cause of the issue, as when system restore was automatically shutting down Windows, I clicked a cancel button in one of the dialogs (I believe for Outlook mail), which asked if I wished to exit whilst email was still in my outbook waiting to be sent. This caused the shut down process of windows to simply hang.
I noticed from task manager that all services and processes were started correctly, but the windows explorer desktop shell wasn’t rendering at all. To fix this I asked a colleague of mine to discover the executable file for the system restore process, which turned out to be
%systemroot%\system32\rstrui.exe
which on my windows 7 64 bit installation resolves to
C:\Windows\System32\rstrui.exe
Executing this process from Task manager (that I was able to open using Alt+Ctrl+Delete shortcut), brought up a dialog that allowed me to undo the system restore I had just done. This then solved my issue after the machine rebooted correctly…. PHEW!!! Big relief as I thought at one point I was going to have to reinstall Windows and all my applications again.