How To Research: The Right Way
So, doing TC4 stuff, you will come across a lot of impossible research papers. To get the hungry chest, I had to go through 4 impossible ones. But don't despair! By researching The Right Way, you can safely ignore these without spending even one more research point on them.
To begin, get a piece of scrap paper or a whiteboard. Next, open up your fresh-out-of-the-box research paper. Take careful note of the runes you see. Create a chart containing each type of rune (from what I've seen, there's 12+ of em; might be more [they seem to appear based on research difficulty; starting at 6, going to 9, then 12, and probably higher later on] ).
Next, go through the chart, marking off each one you see a large* number of runes for. These are the red herrings. What you will be left with is very likely to be the runes you will use. Congratulations, you now have a good idea of how many runes you have to work with and how many aspect types there will be.
Then, compare those numbers to how many you will need to complete your energy path in the research. Don't have enough? Well, you now know your research is worthless and can be tossed without wasting any more research points. Have enough?
Well, now you come to the actual research phase: arrange these runes such as to complete the path. No more wasting multiple runes finding where the good ones are; you already know!
After that, it's simply a matter of figuring out the correct aspects associated with the runes.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is The Right Way To Research. No screwing around with impossible research, no activating and deactivating runes.
*typically 4+ is what I consider 'large'
Addendum 1: This will not always work 100% of the time. In particular, as research gets more complex, you will have an increasing number of runes (at 12 for the infernal furnace), which will probably result in actual red herrings, even with this method. But still, it's a damn good heuristic.