Nice one Oz, old buddy! In fact, as it goes, the cause of the problem was precicely what the first URL refers to. I recently upgraded my 80Gb drive to a 200Gb drive and used MaxBlast3 to do the job as both the old and new drives were both Maxtors and I wanted to preserve my data exactly as it was. Normally, I'd re-install from scratch again to get a 'clean' system but I treated myself to a TV card last Christmas and I had several hour-long programmes recorded to disk that I haven't has the time to convert and write to DVD yet.
Everything else on the system was exactly as it was on the old drive (apart from larger partitions) with the exception of that damn system restore. It seems that even brand specific partitioning and drive installation software causes this problem, and also creates other problems when upgrading the OS. Upgrading from Win98 or WinME to XP (successfully) then trying to copy the upgraded drive to a larger drive crashes out every time (with can't find NTLDR). Copying the drive first then trying to upgrade the OS on the bigger drive also causes the same error.
Anyways, this appears to have cured my problem...cheers :-)
