[diviatix]

I found a solution and perhaps a caution for others.

I reinstalled SPB Mobile Shell and switched the backlight setting to high with the SPB software rather than the default backlight adjust. It changed - changes were saved. From a few little things I looked at I suspect the SPB engine rewrites some Registry entries differently than the default utilities. Beware of settings you canot change and change them with SPB Shell exclusively (before you uninstall it)