I haven't deserted you, but I also don't have any useful thoughts to offer.
Your's is my only unread message in this group, and I leave it out there so
that I'll think about it each time I look at the groups, but I haven't had
any brain waves yet.
Uninstalling and reinstalling would seem a reasonable course to try, but
maybe you've done that already?
I suppose we could go for more diagnostic information--Presumably, each time
you start the machine and this service fails to start, it is logged in the
system event log.
Any chance you could cut and paste the detail of that log entry for us?
Right-click My Computer, choose Manage. Look for Event Viewer in the left
column and click the PLUS to expand the list of event logs. Click on the
System event log. In the right column, scroll down to the time of the last
startup, and look above that for the error. When you find it double click
on it to open it, then click on the icon that pastes it to the
clipboard--third down on the upper right.
Then compose a reply to this thread, and right-click and choose paste to
insert the log information into your text.
--
