Every so often my W98 runs into trouble booting up and defaults to a
saved setup. This very arrogant action distroys my icon placement and
screen setings on the desktop as well as setting older parameters in
Outlook Express and other programs. Even old solved bugs come back to
life! Is there a way to stop this? Can the settings be automaticaly
stored each day so thayt the system only reverts back to yesterday's
settings?

By default the settings made by you are permanent and are stored for
each program with it.
If this problem is continuous then may be your machine is infected by some 
virus or the OS is currupted and may require to run the windows setup again.

One more temporary solution is to take an disk image using the norton
ghost or some other software and restoring the image when you want
your own settings.

Gourav Jain

This is an easy one to answer for me. I work for a major computer
company and support a very large Aerospace company. About 3-4 years
ago we had this problem on a whole bunch of machines. It turns out
this was caused by a Microsoft start-up item called ScanRegW.exe.

1) Go to the start menu and select Run
2) Enter MSConfig and then click OK. The "System Configuration utility" will open.
3) Click on the Startup Tab
4) Look for an entry labeled "ScanRegistry". Uncheck this item and reboot.

For more information on what ScanRegW does, check the following Links:

http://www.liutilities.com/products/wintaskspro/processlibrary/scanregw/
http://www.windows-help.net/windows98/start-145.shtml

When a windows 98 machine boots, ScanRegW scans the registry for
problems. if any are detected it will replace the registry with one
from backup. In our case it replaced the registry with a copy from the
original configuration, thus restoring the settings to the original
set-up.

In our case what was causing this was a bad Printer Driver. We were
using HP 4si and 5si print drivers from our internal print servers.
These drivers were not correct and resulted in a conflict that in some
instances would not allow the ScanRegW to complete properly during
boot up. This resulted in the registry being replaced every so often.

As soon as the system was set back up to the original configuration
(including printers) the problem would return at some point.

My suggestion is to leave ScanRegW disabled. It my 10 years of PC
troubleshooting I have never used this program to resolve an issue and
it has never detected a problem except in this specific case.

Hopefully this helps. Thanks.....

Kidsnoopy, Thank you so much. Time will tell, but I believe you hit
the nail on the head. The links were exceedingly helpful as well. Once
I have done a thorough backup of this computer, I intend to experiment
with registry backup/restore. I have also found a nice little utility
that will backup and restore my desktop icon layout in case of any
similar problem where I need to start in protected mode. When I locate
the link to that again, I will post it here. Thanks again & best
regards.