My computer, as usual froze (I'm in deperate need of a format). But this was nothing un-usual, so i just restarted my computer like nothing had ever happened.

When I restart, on the login screen I get the error message saying that windows has recovered from a serious error and has used a recent registry backup..again this is nothing un-usual so I login normally.

When I login EVERYTHING changed, and I get that baloon popup on the bottom of the screen when you first boot up that says "Welcome to Windows XP!", my theme changed and everything (Since I still have the windows xp background..that didn't change [yes lol im too lazy to change it])

My question is what just happened? Mind you, I'm not complaining, my computer seems to be running much faster now than before lol so i'm happy about that. But I'm a very very curious person and like to know what happened

My initial thought is that it used a really old backup but does it even store backups that far back (I'd say about 2-3 months back). Also, I have more recent back ups so why'd it use that one??