XP not remembering setings on shut down

[Rodentia]

All seems well except for the run dialogue box, eg. I use regedit and maybe MSconfig, normally on reebooting the machine I can reselect either of these two from a drop down in the run dialogue box, but now it remains persistently blank after each re-boot.
Any way to kick the lazy wazak back into action?

[codered6651]

By any chance have you changed the value of RunMRU in regedit? It should be a value of "1".

[Rodentia]

Hi Codered, thanks for the reply!

RunMRU on my machine has three value settings

Default Has value not set
a Has regedit\1
MRUlist Has a

I am guessing that MRU List points to "a" which has the "1" Value and has remembered (for the duration of this boot) that regedit has been used.

This seems to point to it being OK but I am not certain, I do know however that this is the first time I heve seen or heard of the RunMRU value, so I would not have altered it.

Edit: OK it assigns a b c etc to each run command and these are set as individual values

a regedit\1
b msconfig\1
c etc
So it is getting it right during a boot session, but not retaining the info during shut down/boot up.

Also (this is very recent) windows has been taking longer to shut down, and the last two times it had to be manually shut down (power button)
I regularly check for spyware and have Nortons up to date so I don't think either of those two problems are likely.