[Grimmwor]

Daeymon,

I thank-you for the suggestion and for taking the time to reply; a hardware problem is not something that I had considered; perhaps I should. I seem to remember my Western Digital Hard Drive came with some utility or software that allows you to run a diagnostic; I will give that a go, but I really believe this to be a software problem.

I think there is some kind of contention with the Creative Sound Blaster Audigy startup services running on my machine and how they access the ntdll.dll library. The problem is very reproducable. For example, if I move something on my Start menu by dragging and dropping, I get the error every time. It doesn't make my machine freeze or crash, it just pops up a dialog box and then hangs for a second while ending the explorer.exe process. If I just click on My Computer, or Search, explorer.exe launches again and everything is dandy. I have done some experimenting, mostly based on a hunch, and discovered that if I disable the three Creative Sound Blaster startup services that load when I boot up, the problem seems to go away. If I start one or more of the services by launching one of the Creative applications (such as MediaSource Go!), the problem once again rears it's ugly head. These are the specific services I am referring to:

AHQInit.exe
CTDVDDet.exe
CTSysVol.exe

I have a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 sound card. It is not new hardware. It's been in my PC since I built it last year. Like I stated above, this problem seemed to start after I installed the ntdll.dll patch from micro$oft and upgraded to Norton Internet Security 2003 (both within a couple days of each other).

I've searched the Creative knowledge base to no avail.

Well, thanks again for the thought. I'm off to run a hard drive diagnostic. I will let you know if anything comes of it.

PS - LooseChippings,
I can appreciate your objective approach at handling this problem, but I think it would be really nice if I could find a solution or at least the cause of the problem so other folks experiencing the same error won't have to go through this same exercise. I consider a repair install a last resort fix, otherwise, what would be the point of forums like this one? Why not just have a web page that just says: "Reboot. If that doesn't work, reinstall Windows. Good Luck." I have spent a great deal of time customizing many aspects of my windows gui and sound scheme, have a nice, neat, perfectly organized start menu with everything just the way I like it. I have many custom icons and settings, the list goes on. With a repair install, this will all be lost. Customizing things the way I like also took the 'days or even weeks' that you referred to in your post. I would hate to have to start over from scratch with all of that for what is so far just a minor annoyance. And frankly, I am not 100% confident that it will even solve my problem. I read another post somewhere from a poor soul having the same error; he claimed that he did a repair install and it did not resolve the problem. I think that it is unfortunate that Microsoft has such a monopoly on the OS market that reinstalling has become a widely accepted fix for many minor problems (which are in fact bugs and defects). Let me ask you this: how would you feel if you took the Jag in to see the mechanic because the engine was making a clicking sound, and he told you that replacing the engine would make the sound go away? I kind of see this in that same light. It seems pretty drastic. Something is causing the error to occur. I will find it and fix it. I make my living as a programmer (ABAP - SAP R/3). If I suggested to one of my companies clients that reinstalling the application is the best way to fix their bugs, I would likely lose my job...of course our product does not have a monopoly, so we actually have to make it work to get paid. 'nuff said