Hello Everyone,
It is fixed!!! Microsoft tech support determined the windows error reporting service was corrupt and had me reinstall windows 7 over my oiginal installation and this fixed the reliability monitor so that it works perfectly now.
As an aside I had another long term issue which was system restore would not complete a system restore action successfully from normal mode, i could only complete it successfully from safe mode. The microsoft guy said this as it should be because I use norton av. The reason is system restore wants to make changes to the registry to complete its task and norton av inhibits anything from making changes to the registry. Running system resore in the safe mode works because norton is not active in the safe mode.
