Windows 95 not remembering preferences

I have a P166 IBM ThinkPad 560E. After a crash due to a faulty or damaged CDRW, Windows 95 now shows the Welcome to Windows screen each time I reboot, no matter how many times I uncheck the box to “Show screen at startup”. I also lost the preference for small icons in the taskbar. I tried deleting the .pwl file, but that hasn’t worked either. Any ideas how I can restore my computer to be able to save preferences? When the crashes occured, I was trying to copy a file to the CDRW, and I got the blue screen many times either with fatal errors or General protection errors. The computer never was forced to go to safe mode.