The immediate guess is that something someone's downloaded included a "call home" scheduler that's failing to make it's connection. This often happens when an AV or AntiAdware/AntiSpyware program deletes the carrier file after registry entries have been made, and a line in the registry is calling a file/function that was deleted.

Note that that's just one of several most common, but it's easiest to describe.

You may have logs of what's going on already:

Start | Help

Select Index

Put "log" in the search box

Select "recording system and program failures"

Click "Display"

This will give you a brief description of the "DrWatson" tool, explaining that the tool should turn on automatically whenever there's a system or program failure. Don't believe the bit about "turn on automatically" as it ignores quite a lot; but there should be a button to "Open DrWatson," and/or an instruction for how to open from command line.

Open DrWatson

Click on "Help" in DrWatson for a description of what you're trying to do.
You can click "Options" and "Print" in DrWatson Help to print individual items from the Help file, which you may want to do so you can have them handy.

The other reason for opening DrWatson was to read to "Log File Path" so you know where to look to find the file.

The file likely will be at C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Dr Watson\drwtsn32.log, but check to make sure. The .log file should open in Notepad when you double click it.

If you've been having frequent errors that are being recorded, the file may be large, so you'll have need to note, from the Dr Watson Help "Using the Dr Watson logfile" that each entry begins with

"Application exception occurred:"

You can search in Notepad for the "starting line" to see if the logfile identifies an error that's been recurring.

If your logfile is too large to separate things, you can just delete the Dr Watson.log file, and a new (shorter) one will be created the next time a "loggable event" occurs.

If, and possibly whether, you find anything there, in Dr Watson Help, at the bottom of each topic there should be a link to "related informatin." Look at "Event Viewer" for how to see what's happening with glitches that may not show in Dr Watson.

Program identifiers in either Dr Watson or Event Viewer (several functions) can be "cryptic" so you may still have to work a bit to figure things out, even after getting a file name for something that's not working.

Before making any guesswork changes, it would be a good idea to:
1. Rerun AdAware full scan, and let it clean any problems found.
2. Rerun Spybot full scan, and let it clean any problems found.
3. Run HiJack2 and save a fresh hijackthis.log that you'll be able to refer back to for the "problem" system state. Do Not Attempt to Fix ANYTHING in HiJack, unless you're "supremely confident" that you know what you're doing.

(I'll have to look for a link to get HiJack, if you don't have it. It's another free download.)

John