Late last night, I believe I stumbled on a smoking gun. As an experiment, I restored the registry hive from %system%\windows\system32\config\regback and it booted up. Not all of the software was working, and there are a number of odd behaviors. I reverted back to the original registry hive and swapped in each hive one at a time to see if a single file was a problem. I found that restoring the backup SOFTWARE hive was the one that allowed it to boot up. I took that one to another machine and it is unreadable when I try to load it into regedit. I left the backup SOFTWARE hive in place and used the originals of the others SYSTEM, SAM, SECURITY, etc.
It appears that all of my critical software is working (fantastic!), but Windows update is not working and it cannot make any restore points. It will not allow me to rename a folder without an error - "Could Not Find This Item". Overall it is FAR better than BSOD boot loops for sure. I will continue to run some tests to make sure it is working well enough to get work done while I chase down the remaining Gremlins.
I had been (since August) chasing down disk configurations, MBR problems, and other lower level areas looking for the problem. As it turns out Acronis True Image failed to ever make a clean backup of my system. I even went back and manually pulled 10 versions of the SOFTWARE hive going back months before and none of them are readable. Acronis support only offers Level 0 troubleshooting and they spent most of the time telling me that 'True Image is a consumer product....." Like I should have purchased the more expensive version even though the core backup/restore engine is a failure. Never again will I consider Acronis. I since started using Paragon to image and restore numerous machines and it works flawlessly. No effort, no errors. Acronis seems to spend too much time sponsoring race car teams and parties while there core tech is failing.
Not sure where to go from here, but at least the BSOD stop error is less of a mystery. Apparently that is the code if the system cannot read the SOFTWARE hive at all - an unexpected error. Wondering if it can be repaired with a binary editor - maybe just the header is corrupted and the rest (200MB) is just fine?
