XP - moved docs & sets path for a user, settings changes no longer stick

First off, a passing thanks to those who responded to my other thread recently (completely unrelated) - I considered posting to say thanks but with it residing on page 13, that seemed a bit too much like necrothreadmancy.

Now, the issue I'm having. Gotta love the XP "feature" whereby if a user account is created, then deleted; the next account created will use the first's name in the docs & settings path. I got sick of this, and so found some instructions on microsoft.com to change the docs & settings path:

Logged out of the account in question, logged in on another admin acct.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList, changed ProfileImagePath
"Move only user-specific data"

Logged back into the account, everything seemed fine - for some reason Windows hadn't moved the files from the old to the new path; however I figured that may well be normal, as I'd only seen files automatically moved when changing the My Docs path, which is a completely different process. So I decided to regard it as a blessing in disguise and manually moved the files I wanted, leaving several years of accumulated junk behind - didn't delete the old stuff, though. Everything worked fine, barring some error when trying to recreate my quicklaunch bar, which was fixed by moving a file I'd missed.

Next day, turned on the machine and tried to log on - it either hung or decided to take a stroll during logon, and after leaving it for fifteen minutes I rebooted and tried again. This time round, logged on with no issue; but all my user-specific settings were gone.
I was hoping that I'd just corrupted a file by rebooting during the login beforehand, so I set a few things up again and rebooted.

On rebooting, a seemingly random selection of settings did and didn't stick... I'm sure there's a pattern as to which, but I don't know enough about the inner workings of XP to see it.
My theme options did stay as I'd set them, although they'd been reset after the crashed logon. My quicklaunch bar, however, was gone, and for some reason I can no longer change my desktop background. I hadn't changed anything beyond aesthetics, as I was mostly just testing whether or not they'd stick.

In addition, I can't change folder settings - namely turning on view hidden files/folders and view system files, turning on file extensions for known filetypes, and turning off that bloody annoying "This folder contains files that keep your system working, you should not modify them" screen. I can change them in folder options, however they don't take effect, and when I next open folder options they've reset to their default states.

In a somewhat unrelated issue, I can't seem to change the location of my docs - which I've since discovered I don't actually need to do, but it may be relevant, I get the error "The location you requested is not allowed as a target. Please choose a new location.", regardless of the location I try to use.

And finally, my keyboard's regional settings have gone kablooey too. Every " in this post has originally come out as an @, and I can't remember how to change the damned thing. *mutter* To Google!

My next step will probably be to set the docs & sets path back to its original config, and see if that fixes the issue; however, even if it does, it's not a long term solution as I'll still want to have the docs & sets moved. Have I gone obviously wrong somewhere, or missed something out? A great help would be to know where and how the affected settings are stored, as I could then have a crack at fixing them manually - although not being able to view hidden folders has already made doing anything manually a fun challenge.

Update: Yep, chaged docs & sets path back and everything is now working, butas said still not how I want it.