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Just read the email.  Sounds like windoctor which comes with norton sysworks.  Very handy for cleaning the reg. out. 
Have you ever gone into the local group policy objects?
http://www.theeldergeek.com/gp05.htm
Take a look at this link.  I've messed with this a bit in w2k, but not xp.  See if there is anything disabled that might sound familiar.   (Remember the group policy changes in you logs?)  Could be that something is set at disabled that is necessary for a program which would explain the permissions errors (lsass, etc.) 

You can just disable group policys all together by adding these registry keys:
http://www.theeldergeek.com/enable_disable_local_group_policy.htm
(Back up your registry first.....)

Yeah,  I'd wait on the full disable.  Have never done that and if anyone has, please pitch in.  Just poke around and see if anything stands out. 

Sounds good..... Got hung up checking my email from work.     Sorry for the delay.
How'd the reboot fare?

You may want to consider looking in users/passwords.  I realize you are a member of Administrators but check to see if there are any other groups that you belong to.  A prohibition for one of the other groups could be causing the problem.  If you aren't a member of another group, add yourself to the users group as well, retaining membership in Administrators.  Then click apply and exit out of the users/passwords then go back into it and remove yourself from the Users group.  I had mentioned rewriting your acl  (or XP's equivalent if it) a while back.  Did you ever try that?

 
Enjoy your Hash....  never had that myself.  What's it made from?   
Last movie I went to a theater to see was Start Trek Generations.........  Many a moon ago...... Saw a trailer on Stealth a while ago....  Looks pretty good....  Probably wait for the DVD, though.

Did you try to start the service or reboot after changing it to automatic?  I just edited my prior post about your userid.  Many of the security services, including the Security Accounts Manager, are tied directly to the lsass process.

I must fly for the nite but will be back in the morn.   

Sorry I was amongst the missing yesterday.  Tied up with clean up (YardWork)  from being away for vacation.  Try removing yourself from the Ordinary User Group.  This might be affecting your ability to run what wants to run.  Go to users and passwords, select your logon and it should give you options to change the membership.  Here's a link on how to change group membership with XP.
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/usercpl_change_group.mspx

Sounds like hash would have been the perfect pickmeup for those "next morning" vapors! 

Next shot.

Here goes. In English I hope. I was snooping around my event logs over the weekend. I had a bunch of other errors that I had to deal with and took care of them first Something about Security Scriptor errors and DCOM  etc. Fixed all that and then looked at the same stuff we have all looked at already about the Security Accounts Manager error coming up 30 secs AFTER the popup. Remember that? And then the very next error was about the Distributed Transaction,,,,,,,,,forgot right now, but ALWAYS together at the same time. Well, we never paid too much attention about it cause it came after the popup, right? WELL guess what causes the error to pop up??????? These two services trying to START during boot.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! They try to start and then the error pops up and then 30 secs later it is logged into the event log. Why? cause they are on a 30 sec TIMEOUT limit. The error doesn't show until 30 secs later. To prove this I went to my services and tried to start these two items manually and the error pops up instantly and then shows in the log. they are set to Auto but are not running(even as we speak)

Now, the Sec Acc Mgr depends on  the RPC(which runs fine) and the Distributed Transaction,,,,,,, depends on the Sec Acc Mgr, but it won't start so the DisTrans can't start.

I can show all of this with pics but it would be huge. Make any sense?????????????

I'm on it. Back in a flash.....................