I found the problem and u won't believe what it was
Somehow, I'm not surprised! MS being the way it is!
Good for you though! I was going to mention unchecking all the Startup items in msconfig one at a time, but I was waiting to see what would happen with System, and Win.ini files first. I didn't expect you to run through everything, but I'm glad you did. Its always nice to see people do things on their own!
I don't know what could be the problem with Windows Defender as I don't use it. Did you install it on purpose as I'm also running XP and I'm sure it doesn't come with either SP2 or SP3? Its curious that HJT didn't catch this in the HKCU hive as I'm sure it scans the Run key. It didn't show up on the HJT log for HKCU, although it did show up under HKLM.
In any case, apparently there might be something wrong with the key, so if you feel comfortable, you can go to that key address and take a look to see if there is anything weird about it. Please be careful in there! The key looks to start WD and perhaps what it's looking for is not there, thus the error and subsequent pop-up. Does WD appear to be running ok?
Have you ever seen anything like this?
No I haven't. I have seen malformed reg keys cause problems (like the sound problem I mentioned), and having the System32 folder pop up is quite common, but nothing with just C:\Windows popping up at start.
Edited by makai, 14 March 2009 - 07:31 PM.