One great thing about Amazon EBS based instances is the ability to stop the instance and retain your settings and data. However you should be aware of a pitfall for those of us using this feature. Amazon public images have a config.xml in the following folder (Windows instances) C:\Program Files\Amazon\Settings. This file is used by the instance to reset several options each time that instance is stopped and restarted. (This only applies to an Amazon Instance that was obtained through an AWS EC2 Account. If you have a SLXCloud instance that you purchased from Sage this does not apply since your instance will always be available.) Here, ,in the attached .jpg, are the settings which will prevent the instance from reverting to a neutral state after it has been restarted. I recommend that you change these settings on your Amazon Instance as soon as you start it.