Appreciate the sorry but not crying over spilt milk. Some of it was so long
ago it long dried up, but now I at least understand some of the behavior
that occurred after rebuilding the system and hooking up the external. That
is you have to see the external drives before you can change drive letters.
Your idea of exclusion sounds good but could get a little tricky if updates
to exclusions are needed. No restore to them if all does not go well,
although there are few that do not install to \Program Files.

The external is being monitored.
No reset if drive is missing, that seems to be true if memory is correct and
verified by current full backup.
That backup, about a month old, was a copy of one drive to the other using
Seagate utiliy. But since I wanted to look at both drives, comparing what
took place, I left both hooked upon reboot. That obviously wiped the system
restore from the not primary partition. Switched via BIOS. And I really need
to physically switch connections to make sure I'm OK with the now unhooked
drive. I left both hooked up for a few days and had some weirdness with
restore, but don't remember exact details. But do remember I did not get the
expected copy of the partition holding data to both drives and manually did
copy from external drive. I may have even checked to see if system restore
was working and again broke the limit.

or if a drive is enumerated to a different drive letter than before

So when I unhooked the second drive it dumped the restore upon reboot. That
sounds right by memory. I did not take careful notes of action and reaction.

A feather in your hat.

No, but thinking about exactly what he said of possible dire circumstances
related to auto scandisk at startup. Leaving no trace of damaged file which
you might possibly determine what the file originally was.
And that brings up another possible twist. With so much under the no touch
umbrella of system restore, less chance of rolling back to a good file.
And if you get the crash, reboot, scandisk condition, it seems it might be
prudent to run a restore followed by a scandisk where you have complete
control over action and logging?

These are stored as rb*.cab files in the folder

Thanks. I had for awhile moved the My Documents to the archive partition
which worked well, at least for awhile. But that got messy with hooking and
unhooking drives. Gee, I wonder why, now a little better educated. Seems it
might be best to manually move data, leaving folder structure on C:, just in
case I need to fall back to default. At least one program I have expects
that to be the store (My Documents), but can be redirected.

Oh boy. system crashed with VXD error and lost writing. Gee can I remember
all that written.

I was writing that I may have found a way around boot disk. Emptied Recycle.
Unfortunately I discovered that going to the icon in each partition shows 2
files under properties.
That seems to be a problem?
Copied filelist.xml to My Documents, named old, opened in wordpad and cut th
e line for it, pasting in exclude section, saved as xml.
Cycled system Restore. One new restore point. Rebooted to safe and copied
file to system\restore. Checked file in SFP and it had automatically copied
to that location. Boot normal and all looked OK, with external drive.
Created another restore and then booted to safe with external drive.

Windows assigned lettering as if two internal drives and that killed restore
points.
If booted to safe and then hook up drive, it is not detected. So back to
windows.

W/ Ext, edited filelist to exclude "*:\SAFE 1232"  and a couple of other top
level folders. Copied to restore and verified, reboot process to be sure.
Created shortcuts at root of E: internal and V& W roots, external. And in
folders changed in filelist. Create restore point. Delete shortcuts created.
Reboot not adding external. Ran restore, expecting it to complain that
external partitions were missing, but it did not.. Then hooked up external.
Of course nothing changed on external, but it restored all to E:
Double check filelist.xml. Emptied Recycle. Unhooked external and ran undo
restore. And something happened with resore points that did not seem normal,
but did not make note of it. Or was it Recycle behavior, ???
So start over at making shortcuts at roots and in excluded folders. This
includes the subs of the excluded, right?
Create Restore, delete shortcuts, and not empty Recycle. Reboot process (
refers to that I unhook external via tray tool and phsically, then reboot,
and once I get to the first windows screen, it is safe for me to hook up USB
external drive without drive letter mash.)
Run restore with modified process. At shutdown point of reboot, disconnect
USB drive, and plug back in at that first windows screen.

I think I found all files restored and then check recycle where I found
several hidden files via what I wrote above. Started writing this and at
break it went blue screen.

Reboot, auto scan disk. Trying to bring this back to previous point and that

seems now. SAVE!

W/O ext. C: recycle showed 8 files under properties but looked empty.
Hooked up external and checked all partitions for shortcuts and recycle
bins. Shown are no shortcuts and 2,2,8,4, &6 files under the bins
properties. OK, what is this?

Starting over with a cycle of system restore.

That seems to be it. That is a cycling of system restore is necessary after
editing filelist.xml or so it seems.

That is that system restore did not put the shortcuts back into the excluded
folders.
And an undo of last restore removed shortcuts on the root of the drives.
But the recycle bin is still an area of concern. Icon shows it has files, I
did not empty it of shortcuts after deleting them.
And I have the empty option, but opening it shows no files. And it says
there are no files in it.

The partitions where I made no shortcuts, if I choose properties of Recycle
Bin on them, they show the 2 file situation that seems broken prior to
modding filelist.xml.
The other three partitions where shortcuts were created and then deleted
each have 4 files listed under properties. But, there would have been 6
deleted shortcuts plus the two phantom ones before I started the
modification.

Can you help me with this problem?

Thanks for all the help so far.
Norman