I am not installing anything, the settings that keep resetting to defaults are just toggles from user interface, some manual registry edits, group policies and manually disabling services.
This happened before when I updated to 1607 Anniversary Update and happened again with 1703 Creators Update.
I'm not hating on Windows 10 just out of spite, I'm a simple man, I want simple things, Windows 7 just worked for me, Windows 10 is trying to play smart and is frankly way too advanced for me, I like simple stuff that doesn't try to behave like it knows better.
Yes it s RTSS's fault, and I am fine with that, I just mentioned it because I found it funny to cause infini-loop and was relevant to explain why I went into Safe Mode.
I don't use Afterburner for overclocking, I just keep it for RTSS to use as on-screen overlay
I originally went to Safe Mode just to get rid of Afterburner. I just saw the option and my finger itched to click it.
Tried that, succeeded, but didn't help
Also tried the 2nd method and it failed with error along the lines of "Disk is locked" or something like that,
I did try to display the disk and volume attributes, there we no "read-only" flags either.
Restoring from a backup worked though, but I had to wait till Monday to get a laptop from work.