O-kay, that quickly went pear-shaped. FRST informed me it was going to restart the system to finish the fix, but it seems windows 8 didn’t survive the process intact. It booted into Windows 8, and then hung on a black screen for more than half an hour. The speakers popped softly a few times, which struck me as a little odd, but most likely nothing of consequence, I expect. As I don’t have another computer to hand, I rebooted and brought up System Restore via win8 DVD. The only restore point I had was one made earlier this day – shortly before first posting here, actually. This seems to have gotten Windows working again for the time being.

The fixlog.txt file is intact, and has been attached, but the export.reg file is nowhere to be found (despite Windows’ assurances that my documents would be unaffected by the restore, and also despite the fixlog reporting that the reg file had indeed been created)… so apologies for that. :frowning: