System Restore in Win XP Pro

My OS is Windows XP Pro SP2 with 2 GB of ram and an AMD Athelon 64 X2 dual core processor 5200+. My system restore function does not work on my PC. It goes through the motions but after rebooting it states that no changes could be made. This seems to have happened when I started using CCleaner but I am not certain of that. I have searched the items to be removed list in the cleaner, application and issues categories but can find nothing that I recognize as system restore files. I am using the defaults for CCleaner. Am I alone in this problem. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

In observing my System Volume Information folder it does keep adding files about every 5 min. After turning off the latest non-beta Zone Alarm free version, folders stopped being added. There is no doubt that ZA is the culprit. Is there any way around this short of deleting ZA totally. I can find no way of downloading the earlier versions.

Have a look here as it is a good troubleshooting guide for system restore problems.

http://bertk.mvps.org/html/srfail.html

CCleaner does not delete system restore files, however some other cleaners may be more aggressive.