[pvanlaere]

Found the issue.

I've ran regmon and filtered on dcomcnfg and saw that it stop querying the registry for DCOM applications when it stumbles upon a registry item where it doesn't have access to.
So you'll only see the apps with a GUID from {000... until the one with a locked registry key...
This is on Windows 2000 only I presume

In my case this was HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{0BE09CC1-42E0-11DD-AE16-0800200C9A66}
Refering to a Flash utiliy called FlashBroker (C:\WINNT\system32\Macromed\Flash\FlashUtil10b.exe)

With regedt32, I found that there was a Deny rule on Everyone, overruling the Full Control of Administrators and such more.
I fixed these security properties and the problem got fixed.

Whether this is a virus or "regular" Macromedia software, I do not know...

Hope this can help other people having this issue in the future,
Peter