System restore

I seem to have a lot of questions, lately, but I am baffled by a couple of things, one of them being System Restore in Windows XP.

To all appearances there should be more than one date marked in bold on the System Restore calendar, and I should be able to move back from one month to the preceding one.

I never seem to have more than one bolded date on the calendar, and I cannot go back to a preceding month, even though I created a restore point in it. The arrow for going back doesn't work.

So when I created a restore point for yesterday, I expected that it would show up on the calndar in bold, this afternoon. No such luck. Only a Windows-generated restore point from this afternoon and a new one that I created appear, and only today is bolded. Yesterday is not, and the back arrow flickers, but does not show the previous month.

I may have to give up and reinstall XP, which is will be a hassle.This doesn't seem to be my lucky season for the computer!